


Diamond Cuts Diamond

by terebi_me



Series: The Experiment [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Don't split the party, Drug Addiction, Drug Withdrawal, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, Eventual Smut, Footnotes, Humor, M/M, Moriarty's past, Mrs. Hudson's herbal soothers, Non-Consensual Drug Use, POV John Watson, POV Sherlock Holmes, Playing the Long Game, Recreational Drug Use, Star Trek reference, not evil just misunderstood, secret double agent, the opposite of fluff, well kind of evil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-07 02:16:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terebi_me/pseuds/terebi_me
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moriarty kidnapped, imprisoned, drugged, and molested Sherlock over a long bank holiday weekend, then sent him back home. Now Sherlock has to deal not only with drug withdrawal and intense cravings, but with a deeply concerned John, and a lonely villain homicidally desperate for someone to play with. AU splits off from a few months after s1ep3 "The Great Game".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Captain's Watch

**Author's Note:**

> This is very much "adult" in every sense of the word. This is the darkest-before-the-dawn.

John Watson hasn’t slept. It’s been twenty-four hours since Sherlock returned, battered and bruised and drugged to the gills, inexplicably set free by his abductors, and more than two days since John had gotten any sleep. Military vigilance has kept John awake, keeping watch. Sherlock has been sprawled limp and unconscious over the entire surface of John’s bed since yesterday, so deeply asleep he hasn't even turned over. John hasn’t left the room. Hasn’t left Sherlock’s side. Afraid that Sherlock will stop breathing, go cold, or simply disappear if John closes his eyes for too long.

His logical side knows that Sherlock will be fine eventually, but he cannot make himself leave. The great detective looks so fragile, vulnerable in sleep. His forehead and jaw are spotted with bruises in the shape and configuration of fingertips. John can’t keep himself from picturing Moriarty’s cruel hand gripping Sherlock’s face, forcing him to perform God-knows-what demeaning, vicious, disgusting acts, probably wrenching his mouth open to . . . No. John shakes his head. He wants to keep his anger stoked and blazing, but not this way. He doesn’t want to picture Sherlock being abused. 

But Sherlock’s lips are bruised, too, the recurve bow fuller than usual, the delicate skin stained as if by wine. Not the kind of bruise that rises after being hit, but the kind of bruising that results from repeated, crushing kisses. John doesn't want to think about that part, either. No kisses between mortal enemies. He only wants to concentrate the anger inside him, to refine the certainty of knowing that Moriarty has to be killed, and imagine the pleasure John will feel when he does it.

Sherlock begins to snore, the inevitable consequence of Sherlock chain-smoking cigarettes as soon as he got home. John was going to have to put a stop to that as soon as possible, but in the moment, it was better to have just let it happen, to let Sherlock have that sense of control, even if only over his own self-destruction. He’d been drugged, kidnapped, imprisoned, restrained. Assaulted.

_. . . raped . . ._

John bites his lip until he tastes salt. _Captain Watson. Eyes front. Pull it together. Mustn’t dwell on it. Or it will destroy me, and him, and_ us _. Keep strong for_ us _, the new us that exists. Sherlock and me, together. That’s stronger than anything Moriarty can throw at us._

John stretches his eyes open and yawns. He’s tempted to lie down, curl up next to Sherlock, catch even a few minutes’ sleep. The soldier's sense of duty galvanizes him again, and he makes a practical decision: For a few minutes, long enough to make tea and something quick to eat, Sherlock will be all right. Has to be. John has to have that faith. Also (suddenly aware of it) he desperately needs a pee. His joints ache when he stands, and he hesitates at the bedside for a moment, his hand hovering over Sherlock’s shoulder without touching. Sherlock only snores more loudly.

John is able to see to his own needs in less than five minutes. Holding a slice of toast in his mouth and a cup of tea in his hand, he backs quietly through the door of his bedroom. Setting down the toast, John almost jumps out of his skin at the sight of Sherlock not just sat up in bed, but standing _on_ it, fingers scrabbling at the moldings at the top of the wall. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—! Sherlock!” John half-shouts, putting the cup on the bureau and shaking his now-scalded hand. “What are you doing? For God’s sake, sit down.”

Sherlock very slowly turns his head, his eyes flickering over the face of his devoted friend. Hair shoved vertical on one side from sleeping on it, face stark pale and eyes nearly colorless, he’s never looked more like an alien. 

“Unless you have morphine,” Sherlock mutters, voice stretched tight with pain, “fuck off.”

John grasps Sherlock's bony white wrist. “Sherlock, now, come down from there. You’re ill. I’ve made tea; please, have some. Have this one. I've not even sipped it.” Easily, much more easily than John was expecting, he is able to pull Sherlock off the wall. “You should have that toast as well. Nothing on it.”

Sherlock wraps his arms around his greyhound ribs, shoulders hunched and quivering. His complexion is tinted green-grey, like dirty water, his temples damp with sweat. “No. No food. I’m not ill; I’m _sick_. You know the difference. Now come on. I know you have opiates. You gave me some earlier." His hands scrub desperately over his face, scratching his arms so hard they leave red welts. "Please, John. This is unbearable."

John grimaces. “That was before,” he tries to explain. “You were hurt—bleeding—!”

"I'm hurting _now_ ," Sherlock groans through gritted teeth.

"It's withdrawal," John admits sadly. "I can't help you; you'll have to get through this on your own. It’ll only be a few days."

“I tell you, I’m sick!” Sherlock shouts. His arms clench spasmodically, teeth bared in a snarl more of pain than anger. “It’s getting worse! For fuck’s sake, John, if you aren’t going to help—!” His teeth snap shut mid-sentence, his eyes fly open wide, and he bolts with lightning speed for the door. John pursues, frantic with worry—he’s likely to do anything—but Sherlock only dashes into the toilet, collapses, and begins to retch.

Sighing, rolling his eyes, John checks to make sure he’s got his phone on him, and fully charged. So much for sleep. It’s going to be another long day, this one much less pleasant than lying quietly next to a sleeping Sherlock. 

This isn’t John's first time having to supervise an opiate detox. Afghanistan brought him far more than his share of pathetic, whining, shitting, junk-sick souls, soldiers and civilians alike. Not all of them had gotten hooked deliberately; some of the absolute worst were injured men, still in pain, grown dependent on the narcotics given them to treat gunshot wounds and broken bones long-healed. More than once John had been ordered to simply give a soldier the drugs he asked for; too valuable to spend the time to get them straight. War on, and all. And if someone was simply dying, John believed absolutely in making the last moments comfortable.

But Sherlock is simply _not_ dying. Though, likely, at the moment, he feels like he is. 

Sherlock has almost completely inserted his head into the toilet bowl, his angular, spine-knobbled back clenching hard. His thinness is awful. He had no weight to lose before all this happened, and now he's losing the only nutrients he's had in ten days. John wets a cloth in the sink, and when Sherlock sits back onto his heels, breathless, tear-streaked, John gently presses the cloth to Sherlock's forehead. Sherlock tries to swipe John's ministering hands away, but can’t; he’s too weak. In the next moment, Sherlock vomits without effort, all down his bare chest, all over John's feet and ankles.  

"Oops," Sherlock says, a faint smile playing at the corners of his lips. 

"Right, you," John says briskly, "into the tub, then." He steps out of his besmirched trousers and into the tub, runs the tap, wipes himself down with the damp cloth. Sherlock clumsily follows him in, sinking down and slumping back against John’s legs. Patiently, John clucks his tongue and tries to wash Sherlock's belly. 

"I’m not a _baby_ ," Sherlock snarls, snatching the cloth away. "I can do it myself. I’m not _that_ infirm!” 

"You're a rotten patient," John replies mildly. He thinks of taking off his pants, sitting in the tub, too; thinks better of it, and steps out.  

"Been worse."  

"I can imagine." John towels his own feet dry, wipes the toilet seat and the floor, and sits down with a weary sigh. 

"Look, just fuck _off_! You don’t want to be here, so go away!" Sherlock growls. 

"Can't. It's not safe." 

“It does you no good to hover. It’s insulting—er—oh, bugger.” Sherlock hiccups, then gags again, unproductively this time. The spasmodic retching returns. He doesn't protest when John lifts him out of the tub, wraps him in a dry towel, and helps him kneel in front of the toilet bowl again. Not without relief, John has to leave the room to fetch more towels and a clean dressing gown, and hastily step into a pair of clean trackie bottoms.  

When he returns, Sherlock is now seated on the toilet, still shivering and spasming, hugging himself, glaring daggers of hateful embarrassment. His belly churns so dramatically that even John can hear it; progress is now being made in the other direction, as it were. " _Now_ will you leave me be?" Sherlock croaks. 

John can't help smiling as he shakes his head. "I've seen worse," he replies. _Children in pieces. A young woman, beaten to death, found three weeks later, burst open in the Afghani summer heat. The entire population of a little town off the Tarmak River, suffering from ameobic dysentery._ _His own sister, drunk out of her mind, driving off in a car._ "Much worse."

Sherlock rolls his bloodshot eyes. “You’ve no respect for my privacy."

“Not just now, I don’t,” John agrees. “I’m going to bring you a glass of water, and you are going to drink it, even if it just comes right back out again; it'll still do you good. Sorry, Sherlock, but you're under my care now." 

"Joyous," Sherlock drawls. 

A few sips of water manage to stay inside him, but Sherlock hardly seems the better for it. He is nearly weeping now. “Please, John. It can’t be nice to see me suffer. You can make this better, you know. Just a little something. Another two-dot. Some cough mixture. _Something_.” 

Sadly, John shakes his head. "No," he says. “It would only make your withdrawal longer. It might help you feel better for the moment, but we'd end up back here, nonetheless.” He tucks another towel around Sherlock's pale, bony shoulders. "You know this as well as I do. You've been through this before, haven't you? At least once?"

The statement is acknowledged with another eye roll. “Get me a cigarette, at least.” 

“Absolutely not! I’ll fetch your patches, but no cigarettes; wouldn’t do for you to get hooked back on those.” 

" _Fuck_! I can't _do_ this!" Sherlock snaps. When John offers him a fresh glass of water, Sherlock waves it away. “I need to work. A distraction. Something to occupy my mind.” 

“I’ll bring in the newspaper. But right now, you need to hydrate and rest. You’re not just in withdrawal.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Sherlock’s pale lips tighten. “Every moment I’m in here, clues and evidence are being lost—”  

John shrugs. “You won't be very inconspicuous if you're out on the street stopping every two minutes to shit yourself.”

“I have done brilliant detective work in a worse state than this—!” Sherlock's diatribe dissolves as a spasm paralyses him, and when it passes, he shakes with helpless, quiet, dry-eyed sobs. "Oh, God. Oh, God, please, John, please help me. I'm in hell. It doesn’t even know which direction it wants to _go_ now." 

Somehow, John keeps himself from laughing. “I’m sorry. You can endure it for a few hours. You'll be better tomorrow. Let's get you back to bed; you'll feel better under some blankets. Do you think you can tolerate a bit of fruit jelly?”

“ _Hate_ jelly. _Shan't_ feel better,” Sherlock mumbles, sounding like a child, and it’s all John can do not to hold Sherlock in his arms the way he would a sick little boy, knowing Sherlock would make John's life a misery if he dared. 

John doesn’t fuss tucking Sherlock in. He leaves a few dry towels on the bedspread and holds Sherlock’s wrist to check his pulse. Sherlock is weak enough to submit, but says, “If nothing else, John, I need my laptop and my phone. If I can’t leave, let me at least work from here. There are still things I can do—things that I need to find out."  

Sighing, “Oh, all right,” John goes to fetch the electronics from the sitting room. First, though, he takes a moment to put the kettle on, preparing a cup of sugary peppermint tea for Sherlock, and a three-bags-strong mug of Tesco Gold for himself.  

By the time John returns, Sherlock's teeth are chattering, and he has clenched the blanket around him as if trying to merge it with his flesh. He greedily seizes the laptop, hissing a happy “Yesssss.” Once it's open he takes the cup from John's grasp and gulps at it, grimacing, setting it back on the table at safe ignoring distance. "Proper tea next time," Sherlock mutters, fingernails clattering on the keyboard. 

“It’ll help sort your stomach,” John tries to explain. 

"Oh won't that be a blessing." Sherlock hesitates, a spasm of pain passing over his face, and edges the laptop over the surface of the bed towards John. “You’ll have to type for me. My hands are shaking too much.” Sherlock wraps the blankets around himself, even covering the top of his head, leaving only the oval of his face visible. “Right. I've got the terminal window open; type these precise characters.”

John hunts and pecks, alternating with sips of his own tea. “Sidney Sussex?” he reads from the header of the terminal window. “Isn’t that where you—” 

“Yes, the college I attended. And from which I was expelled, then attended Oxford; also expelled. Don't interrupt. Have you got the 'nodal' query up yet? Good. Now type, all caps, ‘name search.’” 

John follows the instructions literally to the letter, ending up at another blinking prompt telling him to wait. "What are you looking for?" 

“A trail,” Sherlock replies, slurping the mint tea. He already sounds better, and there is color in his cheeks at last, though his hair clings to his sweat-wet forehead and his lips are gray and chapped. “I have a hunch. Don’t talk. Type.” 

“It says 'student records–archives' and it's blinking.”

“1996 dash 2000.”

“Search,” John reports back.  

Sherlock smiles grimly. “Moriarty, comma, James,” he says. 

“Oh,” says John quietly. He types it in. “Not found,” he reads. 

“Give it here. You’re too slow.” He takes the laptop back, and his white fingertips skitter across the keyboard. John sips his tea and watches as query after query returns the same message: _Not found._  

“Wiped,” Sherlock sighs. “The records look intact. Photographs, marks, results, all of it. I’m there. But he’s not. But the edges are ragged; both Maths and Computer Science report one more total enrollment ‘97 to ‘98 than they display.” 

“Amazing! How did you know?” John asks.  

“He told me.” 

“And you believed him?” At Sherlock's glare, John hastily amends, “Uh, never mind. But—how's that possible? Has he been following you all this time? Is it just a—a school rivalry, or—?” 

“He was in different departments; I read Chemistry. We wouldn’t have seen each other in classes. And I followed him all this time, as well, without knowing it was him behind Carl Powers. It’s nothing to do with academics,” Sherlock replies. “More private. More  . . . kinky.” He shakes his head and presses his lips together, a nauseated expression curling his lip. “We did seem to share some . . . extracurricular interests.” He stares at John. “I think he’s in love with me.” 

“You what?” John blurts.  

Snatching up one of the towels, Sherlock jumps out of bed again, running back toward the toilet. He collapses in the hallway before he makes it, and resumes retching, burying his face in the towel. He looks pitiful, pale and naked and bony with a cheerful orange beach towel wrapped around his head, the muscles in his back straining like a cat trying to expel a hairball. "Jesus!" John gasps. "Sherlock. Sherlock!"  

His flatmate is retching too hard to draw breath. John slips his phone from his pocket and speed-dials Mrs. Hudson. "I'm sorry to bother you, but would you please make some hot broth for Sherlock? And bring up an extra blanket? He really, er, really needs help, and I'm having trouble looking after him by myself." 

"Oh, of course, John," she replies gently. "Don't you worry; I'll be right up." 

At the sight of her in the doorway, Sherlock loses the mint tea, all over the beach towel. “Oh, dear!” Mrs. Hudson squeaks in dismay. Sherlock tries to smile at her, but the expression drifts off his face and his eyes lose focus as he passes out. 

Struggling to shift Sherlock's body and drag him to the sofa, John laughs humorlessly. "Yeah, it's like this," he says. "He's badly dehydrated. It's a wonder he's not delirious. Might be. Hell, I might be!"

“I’ll sit with him, John; you manage the towel,” Mrs. Hudson says briskly, her composure regained. “I’ve brought him one of my herbal soothers, and I’ll see that it gets into him when he comes round again. It’ll keep his fluids down. I think this is the worst of it. And look at you; you're nearly as bad off. You need to eat something and get some sleep; you'll not make him well by torturing yourself. You Army men think you're invincible.” 

“No,” John replies, gathering up the towel, “no, we're really not.” He almost wouldn’t mind an herbal soother himself. 

"Put those in the wash, please, on hot, not too much soap. And when you get back, you can spell me, and I’ll go make you some bacon sandwiches, and I've just made some lemon scones, and you'll have a few of them as well. It'll do him no good if you're out of sorts. You've done what you could. Tsk, oh, Sherlock. There, there, sweet boy.”  She tucks a blanket around him and settles his head in her lap, gently stroking his forehead. 

John starts the wash, and when he returns, Sherlock’s eyes are open, and Mrs. Hudson murmurs, “There, now, just let it melt in your mouth. Here’s John to look after you.”  

Faintly, almost inaudibly, Sherlock whispers, "Thank you." 

John settles on the sofa and Sherlock moves his heavy head into John's lap. His eyes close again and he seems to sleep, peacefully for a change. Mrs. Hudson returns with a plate. Once John’s finished the last buttery crumb of sarnie and scone, fatigue has overwhelmed him, tea or no tea.  

He locks the door, settles back onto the sofa next to Sherlock, and stares at the ceiling, his exhausted thoughts as knotted as he imagines Sherlock's stomach to be 

Love? _Love?_ Moriarty, the most conscience-less killer John has ever personally encountered, and nearly the most horrific one he’s ever heard of? What could Sherlock mean? Surely he’s got no idea what he’s talking about; Sherlock doesn’t understand love himself, so how could he diagnose it in someone else, especially someone as completely pathological as James Moriarty? John generally resists branding people as “sick,” but the whole concept of it all couldn't be considered any other way. 

All those deaths. All those innocent people murdered, for a game. This is a bridge too far. John simply does not get it. And for now, anyway, he doesn't want to.

He strokes Sherlock’s hair and watches him breathe. Later, he will make sure Sherlock eats. John won’t rest until Sherlock’s healthy again (but a bit of sleep now, honestly, it can't hurt, can it?). And then they’ll go catch the bad guy. Together they’ll put an end to him; slay the monster, make the world a better place. 

 _That’s_ love, damn it.

++++++++

When John wakes hours later, it’s morning all over again, and Sherlock’s already up. 

He's seated on the toilet again, but he's wearing his dressing gown, talking on his phone, and showing no signs of physical discomfort. His voice is in a higher register, an unfamiliar accent; if John wasn’t looking right at him, he’d never think it was Sherlock speaking. “Danielle, right? Yeah, hi.” He glances up at the approaching John, and holds up his hand to demand John’s silence. “I haven’t been able to contact Professor Coates, and I’m trying to verify a quote by one of his students? Yeah, I’ll hold a moment. Oh, I didn’t say, my name’s Ian Maybury, I’m writing for the _Guardian_? Yes, cheers, thanks.” 

“You all right?” John whispers. 

“Fine,” Sherlock says in his normal voice. He looks much improved, though the dark circles under his eyes have deepened, and the bruises on his face are starting to turn purple. Suddenly his eyes brighten; he’s back on the line. "Yes, hello! Professor Coates, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. I’m wondering, by any chance, if you recall there was a special student in Maths in ’97. Little bloke, maybe 13, 14, bright as a button, a Dubliner? Dark hair and eyes.” 

Sherlock listens patiently, and then says, “Do you remember his name? I’m trying to track down one of his student papers in Iwasawa theory but your name tends to—yes, you remember him, don’t you? Oh, I understand, I’m shit with names myself. Takes after my mum, yeah? Ha! Heh, right. Well, thank you for your time, I’ll try Professor Holt next.” Sherlock slowly slides the phone into a pocket of his dressing gown, and meets John’s eyes. “Could you help me into the bath, please?” he asks, painfully sliding the robe from his shoulders. “I don’t think I can stand on my own.” 

“Sure,” John says, “sure.” 

Sherlock’s armpits stink of poison sweat and his hair is crispy with it. John gently soaps Sherlock’s skin and hair, rinses and dries him. Wants to kiss him so badly, but doesn’t want to hurt the still-bruised lips. Oh, but it turns him on, having Sherlock so weak and pliable, submitting meekly to being bathed, his cheeks flushed pink, his eyes heavy-lidded, as if the phone performance used up every ounce of energy he had. “It’s true. He told me the truth," he marvels. “He was there. He. Was. There! Maths and Comp-Sci, just as I thought. He’s been watching me. Wanting me. Since he was a _kid_. I don’t know why.” 

“’Course you know why. Let’s get you back into bed,” John murmurs. “You’re knackered. I don’t suppose you bothered to feed yourself while you were up?” 

Sherlock just laughs at him. “He was there,” he repeats deliriously, “he was there.” 

This time, John tucks Sherlock in tight, edging his trash bin directly next to the bed. “Now, will you rest?” John asks. “Now that you got your answer?”

“Only another lead,” Sherlock mumbles. He yawns hugely, and seems dazed when it passes. “Bless those herbal soothers . . . What time is it?” 

“It’s—” John has to check, himself. “Half seven. Can you go back to sleep, do you think? Even for a bit? I’ll have hot soup for you when you wake up. And toast. If you . . . want toast.” 

“What I want—” Sherlock yawns again. “—is for you to pack for overnight. And take the 9:24 to Cambridge. And take a look at those records, physically.” 

“Sherlock—” 

“You’re right,” Sherlock says softly, cutting off John’s protest. He lifts one of John’s hands, and presses his red-and-purple lips to the back of it, then holds it lovingly against his own face. A kiss by proxy. “I can’t go anywhere in this state. I’m not coming off a six-month binge. I could easily have died from an overdose; I received the precise amount of morphine possible, over the course of four days, before it would have become dangerous. He’s good, I’ll give him that. I’ll recover by tomorrow night. But I need those records. I need that proof. _Now._ If that information can be recovered, it’s a large piece in the puzzle, and it begins to come together. _We shall have him_ ,” he insists, staring at John with half-mad, wide, determined eyes. “We will know from whence he came, his earliest areas of expertise—”

“Besides cold-blooded murder and botulinium,” John says dryly.

“John. Please. Do this for me.”

“I can’t leave you.”

“Yes, you can. We do this together, or not at all. This is _your_ move. I can work from here, but someone needs to talk to Professor Coates, and also Jonathan Rye, who is still in the area though he is no longer employed as one of Stephen Hawking’s assistants. Use your medical credentials. Talk to Rye and find an in from him. It’s all incest and gossip at Cambridge, but hard copy will be useful for making our—” He yawned again. “Making our case.” 

“There is no case, Sherlock,” John says gently. 

“There is,” Sherlock replies, his eyes suddenly very clear and incisive. “ _I_ am the case. He and I. The connection. It is a lead on which I shall reel him in. Use his own ‘love’ against him.” He all but spit the word. “Promise me, John. Find it. The proof.” 

“OK,” John says, resigned. He strokes Sherlock’s hair off his forehead. “I’ll get dressed. Right now, though, I’m making you something to eat and making sure you eat it.” He attempts a smile, but his face is too tight and worried for it to make it very far. “Toast. And soup.” 

Sherlock smiles—a real, genuine, friendly smile. “I’d rather have a kebab right now, to be honest.” 

John brightens. “Really?”

“No.” 

“Hm,” says John. “I’d better get to it, while you’re still charming.” 

Once John has seen an entire cupful of broth and a whole slice of dry toast disappear into Sherlock, and not come back out again, he dresses himself and packs a bag of clean clothes, his laptop and phone. Sherlock is absorbed in his own laptop, taking notes onto a sheet of paper with a pencil; at the moment John is finished, Sherlock hands over the paper. “Names. Phone numbers, addresses, location of archives. If you’ve got a moment to go to the library and check the local newspapers from ninety-six to two thousand, please do; our boy genius might have made the papers once or twice. _I_ did. Note any gaps. And get Jonathan Rye. Moriarty would have worked directly with Professor Hawking in mathematics; Rye might well remember the little bastard and what he was like. Remember that his name might not have been that, or he might have been there under a different name—remember that he had already killed Carl Powers by then, only months previous to the time when he arrived at Cambridge. Let’s see if we can find out who else he might have done. I have some access from here, and if I find any leads, I’ll text. All right, then?”

John takes a deep breath. “Can I trust you’ll be all right?” 

“Don’t be an old woman, John; we’ve already got one on the premises. By the way, if she’s about, ask her to bring up another herbal soother.” Sherlock grins at John’s expression. “I’d hate to lose my breakfast. Now skip along.”

“No smoking,” John says. 

“No promises.” Sherlock winks. “See you Friday morning.” 

John glances worriedly back at the flat from the landing outside. He doesn’t hear the sound of any vomiting, or groaning, or other distress, only the merry clickety-clack of Sherlock’s fingers on keyboard. He passes by Mrs. Hudson’s door without knocking; if Sherlock wants to get an herbal soother, he can ask for it himself.  

It’s sunny and gorgeous in Cambridge when John arrives; the beautiful campus buildings fill John with a vague sense of social-class jealousy. Still, he follows up on Sherlock’s directions, heading directly to the offices of Professor Brian Coates, emeritus, formerly of the computer sciences department. His secretary, Danielle, is a lissome redhead in coral lipstick and a little blue dress so demure that it turns back round to flagrantly sexy. Sheer black tights with tiny polka dots on gorgeous, curvy, strong legs and high heeled shoes with the little strap across the top of the foot. Almost automatically John chats her up and she chats back, and by the time Coates makes it to the office to meet him, John’s got a date to take Danielle for a drink that night. It’s not until he’s in Coates’s inner office before it occurs to John that perhaps going for drinks wasn’t exactly why Sherlock had sent him up here. 

Still, he gets back to the task at hand. Coates is rather an old man, to John’s surprise; for some reason he imagined that computer science professors would be younger and hipper. No, Coates is one of the old guard, part of the punch-card generation, and though he’s well into his seventies, he’s got a sharp mind. “Moriarty? That’s right, that was his name. Yes, I do remember that student. He was very young, quite remarkable, quite interested in the history of computing, as well as the internet, which was still quite exotic back then. Still, he wasn’t interested in computer _games_. He was a lot more interested in theory. And also the phone phreakers, the early hackers, the ones who could break into systems using only a phone dial tone simulator. He was an expert on all that—going on about Captain Crunch, and that sort of thing.”

“So, crime,” John prompts, a little stiffly.

Coates shrugs and blinks behind his thick glasses. “More like—possibilities. Infrastructures. Languages. He was also a maths whiz, if I recall correctly.”

“Do you remember hearing his name in context with anything else since?” John asks.

“Ah, well, no, no, I really don’t poke my head out much. I’ve never been much one for news. Anyway, yes, I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you. He was very pleasant, almost solicitously so. I remember he was always very well kept for a teenager, almost as though he wished that he were wearing a school uniform, but one from the old days. The very old days—Victorian!” Professor Coates laughs. “Funny lad. I wished him well. Is he?” 

“Um—he is,” John replies, discomfited. “For some reason, he has disappeared from the school records. I just found it curious. Is there a backup of them anywhere I could access?” 

“I’m afraid not. Victim of format rot. The backups were on stacks of ZIP disks, and they were lost when the building that housed them flooded several years back. Not to mention the fact that I doubt there’s a working ZIP drive in the city anywhere, and if there were one, it’d be here!” 

“Hm,” John says. “What was the cause of the flood, if you recall?” 

The professor’s fluffy eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Now that you mention it,” he says slowly, “it was vandalism, during the big war protest some years ago. Some protestor or other opened a water main. Turns out they had the wrong building, anyway; they wanted the one across the way. Got off with a warning and a fine. I mean, I didn’t want war any more than anyone else, but that’s no way to get the message across. Anarchists never change, do they?” 

John shakes his head. “No, they do not,” he agrees with a sigh. 

There’s nothing at the newspaper morgue, either; whole issues missing, the microfiche abstracts of articles unreadable. It looks as though someone has been at them with a razor blade. At the edge of the spool, would never have been noticed by anyone not looking closely, is a tiny heart scraped into the emulsion.

He texts Sherlock. **He’s been here. Nothing on file; all destroyed. But he left a heart in the margin of a microfiche for you.**  

The immediate reply: **How romantic. Have you talked to Rye yet? SH**  

 **No, on my way there now.**  

 **Ask him about Professor Hawking. And don’t get too drunk tonight; you want to be able to perform. SH**  

John almost texts back “How did you know” or “You don’t mind, do you”, but decides against it, puts his phone away, and strides back out into the dreamy sunshine.

It’s odd to imagine Sherlock here, odder still to imagine a miniature Moriarty—did he have that sleazy little downy mustache in those days, too? Adolescent Sherlock, though; he must have been terribly awkward at seventeen, or perhaps terribly beautiful, all bones and limbs and eyes increasingly blurred with heroin or crackle-sharp with coke. Perhaps they were one and the same for young Jim, out of place, so far from home, with blood already on his hands and not an ounce of remorse in his heart. John slips almost into a reverie, strolling beside the glittering Cam, eyes dazzled by Cambridge’s endless green lawns and ancient stonework. It’s like a story, a thousand stories, a world’s understanding of fantasy and myth, Tolkien and Lewis. Imagination peeks from every corner. 

“Oh, yes, how could I forget,” Jonathan Rye says, serving John tea on a shaded terrace at the side of his small house in the midst of the buildings of the campus itself. The whole place has been optimized for wheelchair access, cleverly, as unobtrusively as possible, but also a bit rusted, unused for a while. “Not the youngest student I’ve seen here, but one of the youngest, yes. James Moriarty was a transfer to Sidney Sussex from UCL, and before that he’d been at Dublin City University, where he’d entered as a sudden prodigy at the age of eleven and immediately began wrecking the EECA. Not entirely sure what he was doing in London on his own; as far as I knew, his father was a professor at Trinity, but James never mentioned his family at all. It was as if he had emancipated himself already. At any rate, by the time he arrived here, he was already working on postgraduate-level research in network security, but it had already started to bore him and he began to concentrate more on applied mathematics. We called him the Macrophage.” Rye has the beefy, muscular appearance that characterizes all of the personal assistants of the esteemed Professor Hawking, but the muscles are no longer taut; he’s visibly going to seed. “Just absorbed everything placed in front of him, and kept moving, looking for more. Brilliant mathematical mind and he hadn’t even really given it much thought, but when he was finally challenged, it was a sight to see.”

“Do you have any of his papers I could look at?” John asks hopefully, knowing he won’t understand a word, but just to get the satisfaction of seeing his name somewhere, so that he’d feel like less of a ghost. So hard to even believe in Moriarty sometimes; he’s so unlikely, so slippery, he is a phantom, a boogeyman, who only comes in nightmares, when children have been very, very naughty. But who ever did anything to him that would justify what he became? 

Rye shrugs. “Not my area,” he admits. “I can barely balance my checkbook.” His smile thins. 

“Would Professor Hawking?” John asks innocently. 

It’s like a cartoon, how the red floods his face up from the neck. “I wouldn’t know,” Rye all but spits. “Again, not my area. Not anymore. I was let go some—some years ago. Besides, good luck in getting to him. He’s like the Pope.” 

“I’m–I’m sorry,” John stammers. 

“It’s not right,” Rye goes on, staring into the corner, his face slumping into a frown. “I didn’t do anything. But that’s Stephen, isn’t it? He wants what he wants, he gets into his little snits, and no one can tell him a thing. It sickens me to watch them fawn over him like he’s a saint or . . . He’s just a bloke with an illness; doesn’t make him better than the rest of us. Just good at physics and maths, is all, and wrote a book, and now he’s God, or he’d like to think so. That new one he’s got, that Jake or whatever his name is, what he gets up to with Stephen’s wife. And him too, I’d bet!” 

“Oh, dear,” says John, grimacing. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.” 

Rye waves his hand and his frown turns sad. “Ah, well, that’s how it is,” he says. “Mustn’t grumble. I just  . . .  can’t see myself being a carer for anyone else, you know? Say what you will about Stephen; he’s a bit unforgettable. Difficult as hell, but extraordinary.” 

“Everyone’s extraordinary, in his own way,” John says. 

“You know what I mean,” says Jonathan Rye, and John sees, flashing in his eyes, the truth of it, written all over John’s face. “What with Sherlock Holmes. Imagine if he quit you. How you’d feel.” 

“I didn’t—I didn’t know you knew,” John mutters, embarrassed. 

“I do read the internet, you know,” Rye replies. He suddenly narrows his eyes at John. “Moriarty,” he repeats, thoughtfully. “Your blog—Moriarty. You mentioned—” 

“Yeah,” says John. “We think it’s the same bloke.” 

All anger has left Rye’s face; he blinks a few times in astonishment. “Oh, dear,” he says, “I bet. Oh, God, why couldn’t I put it together? Oh, dear. It’s all coming back to me now.” He smiles sheepishly at John. “There were . . . parties. You know.” 

John asks, “Was Professor Hawking at any of them? Or was it just you, on your off hours? Maybe you should have invited him.” Leaving the rest of his tea on the table, John stands, nods a brief goodbye, and makes his exit, standing back in the brilliant sun sighing with relief. And a touch of confusion.

When did he learn to talk the way Sherlock did? It’s as if he brought a tiny sliver of Sherlock along with him, embedded in his mind, ready to emerge like a snake striking at information. He isn’t sure he likes it.

He texts back to Sherlock: **Rye confirms. In London at right time for CP. Look into a Professor Moriarty at Trinity; see what happened to him. And you’ll have to tell me about these parties. Home tomorrow.**  

That night he has more whiskey than he ought, after a hot day like this one and after the days he’s had, and  he ends up falling asleep between Danielle’s legs with her dotted tights still on, waking in the morning to an empty bed and a brutal headache. 

After a shower, he walks the few miles to the train station to clear his head a bit more. He’s received no texts since the exchange in the early afternoon, while he was still examining the newspapers. He hopes that Sherlock had got ahold of another herbal soother and some food, and had spent the rest of the day and night asleep, healing. At a kiosk at the train station, he purchases a London paper, and falls asleep under its spread leaves for the journey.

It’s a dreadful hassle to get a taxi, so John ends up taking the tube back to Baker Street, a lengthy and annoying journey. John tries to distract himself with the newspaper, and succeeds, reading of a badly botched mission in Afghanistan that resulted in multiple casualties, both civilian and American military. A wedding shot up by mistake. It sickens John, but he can’t keep himself from reading the story over and over again, trying to find the loophole, the error, that would have prevented the fatal outcome. But there isn’t anything. He hates admitting that sometimes there just isn’t a hero, a simple answer; things went sideways a long, long time ago, and now the only thing left to do is mourn and clean up the bodies. 

At least it’s a beautiful afternoon at Baker Street when he finally arrives. John ducks into Speedy’s to get some chocolate croissants for Sherlock; the task of fattening him back up will be one that John enjoys greatly, hoping that for once, Sherlock will have excellent appetite. John does notice that Speedy’s seems to have an entirely new staff on today; the nice young Indian bloke who usually staffs the counter is nowhere to be seen.  

He remembers that this was the location of Sherlock’s initial poisoning, and tosses the croissants into the bin before going in and upstairs and home.  

“Sherlock, I’m back,” he shouts ahead. “Sherlock? You awake?” He looks into Sherlock’s bedroom, only to see the bed as crisply made as it had been days ago. His own bedroom is disheveled, but just as deserted. “Sherlock!”

The flat is empty.   

There’s a note on the TV in Sherlock’s impeccable handwriting.  

_John, I’m sorry. I’ve no choice. Have faith._

Below the TV set lies a torn scrap from the television section of the very edition of the newspaper that John has been reading all day, though he never got that far. John picks it up and scans it for information. On one side it’s just red; from the middle of a large image in an advert. On the other side is a TV listing. 

**4:20 - BBC2 - STAR TREK “Charlie X”.** **The _Enterprise_ picks up an unstable 17-year-old boy with dangerous mental powers who lacks the training to handle them wisely.**  

John runs his hand through his hair at the forehead, and ends up clutching his temples as if willing his brain not to explode. “No,” he begs, almost falling to his knees on the carpet, “no. No. No, please, no.”


	2. Martingale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Recovering from his experiences at the hands (and quite a bit of the rest) of Moriarty, Sherlock fetches the newspaper, and receives a startling new message.

_In probability theory, a martingale is a model of a fair game where knowledge of past events never helps predict the mean of the future winnings._

“See you Friday morning,” John replies, voice edged with hopeful concern.

Sherlock doesn’t really notice John leaving. His mind is locked in single-minded research mode, looking for potential information about Moriarty’s father. Or mother, or family of any kind, but he’s got that single loose thread. 

After perhaps an hour, he realizes that, impossibly, there have been stumbling blocks everywhere. 

The archive databases of Trinity College Dublin, the first and most obvious source, are utterly inaccessible. All attempts to log onto any servers crawl to a halt until, a few minutes later, they finally time out. TCD has scores of servers, some for which Sherlock can only guess the root passwords, but he never even gets a chance to try to log on. Then the Baker Street wi-fi freezes up entirely, and he has no choice but to power cycle the modem.

Back online, he tries another approach. A quick survey of TCD student Twitter accounts, bounced off international servers in Holland and Iceland and Hong Kong, reveals that there’s a power outage going on at the school, has been for an hour or so. No internet; no apparent reason; no one knows what's happening. The same situation exists at Dublin City University, UCD, DIAS . . . Sherlock's eyes burn dry in frustration. He emails his contacts in the university system in Dublin, but the messages bounce back as “account not found.” Police stations’ online databases are down. Even unrelated websites about villages, neighborhoods, nightclubs, the My Bloody Valentine fan club—nothing as definitive as a 404, just a polite hesitation that leads to nothing. Nothing from Limerick, either, or Galway, or Cork. Sherlock bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes salt. All of Ireland, experiencing a network outage? 

Ah.

All too obvious; clumsy, even. Crude. Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. Undeniably effective.

On the bedside table, the phone shudders noisily. An incoming text from John. Reading it, replying to it, Sherlock strokes the screen of his iPhone until his skin oils blur the characters into soft focus. He carefully words his replies. Obviously, Moriarty knows that Sherlock is searching; thus it’s very likely that he is also intercepting his phone communication. He's baited Moriarty with the name of Stephen Hawking. It will rankle him, one way or the other, to have the reference brought up, and anything that annoys Moriarty, even theoretically, pleases Sherlock. And John is going to get a leg over with a pretty secretary, to shore up those hetero bona fides that seem to mean so much to the doctor. Sherlock wonders idly what John would do if Sherlock had sex with a woman, just to show John that he can, if he chooses to. It just hasn’t been important; it has almost never been important. It is only important with _John_ because . . . because.

_He's John Watson_. 

An uncontrollable wave of fatigue crashes in Sherlock’s skull. It’s mid-afternoon. He’s been seated cross-legged for hours. Groaning and grimacing with the pain in his knotted muscles, Sherlock heads to the kitchen and prepares and drinks a sludgy, triple-strong cup of instant coffee. It gives him an awful stomach cramp that rushes him back onto the toilet. There is nothing inside him but fluids, but it still hurts like he’s been eating broken glass and rusty nails; he's shitting and crying completely without inhibition, moaning, begging for it to stop.

Eventually, it does, bringing with it a profound sense of exhausted peace. This is the last of the agonies of his gastrointestinal tract—the light at the end of his tunnel, as it were. Now it’ll only be headaches, muscle aches, minor hair loss, a deepening of the lines on his face, symptoms mostly caused by dehydration. All the drugs had been clean and precisely measured; nothing that Moriarty had given him has caused anything more than a vicious hangover.

Besides the longing, like a stab wound into already heavily scarred flesh.

As utterly empty inside as he has ever been, Sherlock crawls, shaking and weakened, to bed. He swaddles himself in his bedclothes, face burrowed into the pillow, not so much falling asleep as being crushed by it.

In his dreams he runs along rooftops. Suddenly his shoes skid on a wet tin roof, and he falls. He gets up and climbs again, runs again, only to slip and fall again with a clang of corrugated panels falling after him. Disregard. Reset. Climb again. _I have to get it._ Slip, fall. Anger flaring at last, climbing, running, falling as if through a hole, this time no way to climb up, no way to get out. Stuck. Screaming in impotent rage, calling for John. Pleading. Alone. In darkness, calling out. _John, please! Come, Watson, I need you!_

The prayer is not answered.

When Sherlock wakes, he feels like a sheep has crawled down his throat and died there. It’s morning again—he slept all evening, all night, a good fourteen hours, leaving him hungry, thirsty, dull of brain. When he gets up, he hastens to brush his teeth, and desperately gulp down some water to give the dead sheep something to do. The water doesn't immediately try to escape via either exit route, for which he is immensely grateful.

Wrapping his blue dressing gown around his naked body, Sherlock pads downstairs to fetch the morning paper from the front step. Even cloud-dimmed, the daylight hurts his dry, sensitive eyes, and yet he’s glad to see it, to breathe the air of Baker Street, of London. As soon as he can, he wants to be out in it again. 

_to get more, just a tiny hit, just a bump . . ._

Not yet. He clicks on the kettle and retrieves his secret-secret stash of cigarettes (the merely secret stash has been crumbled into the bin). He hesitates as he lights one, though, and after a single deep drag of smoke into his lungs, stubs out the rest and bins it. He puts the secret-secret stash back into its hiding place in the kitchen doorframe, knowing he’ll want them later, even if he doesn’t now. Even after this, even despite any best intentions, he is not unrealistic. But for now, he needs to reserve strength, let tissues heal, get his breath back.

After the first cup of tea, he methodically and thoroughly bathes, shaves, moisturizes his face and hands, trims his fingernails, brushes a few drops of Moroccan oil into his hair and scalp. His bruises are fading into interesting blues and yellows as hemoglobin is replaced by bilirubin. Cleansing complete, he clothes himself in a fresh, crisp pale-blue shirt and one of his standard black suits that he draws carefully from its dry-cleaning shroud. He examines himself approvingly in the mirror. His façade is nearly complete again. 

Oh, but inside him, the debate grows heated, a shouting match, threatening to come to blows. _John—morphine—curiosity—confusion—lust—I wish—no!_ ** _John_** _. Fuck, fuck, damn, damn, bugger and blast. Need John but so glad he can't see this. Control, Holmes. Control. Mustn't slip, fall apart, mustn't become what Mycroft thinks I am. I'm no junkie; never have been. I've always been in control of it. Control this longing for the ichors and powders and sweet keen injections—no! Turn it off!_ Desperately he scrubs his hands over his smooth, silk-soft face, wishing he could claw off the skin and find some kind of release.

_I just need a bump. Just a fucking tiny bump. I swear I'll be fine after that. Between John and the work, I'll be fine. One more hit and I'm done._

The flat has been systematically stripped of drugs. Sherlock checks all his hiding places, increasingly desperate, muttering curses to himself as he lifts every mattress and sofa cushion and loose brick in the fireplace. Even the wrap of cocaine, palmed from a suspect months ago, that he'd slipped into a gap in the hall wallpaper is gone. John’s thorough, even if he missed the cigarettes. (Or perhaps left them behind deliberately. But he wouldn't. Would he?) That cocaine would have been so welcome now; he needs to think. And without John's presence, Sherlock is hopelessly scattered. He’s not even sure what to do next; what he means to do at all. _Just find Moriarty,_ something in him mutters. _Uncover his secrets, find the gap in his armour, the bit of him untouched by Lethe; expose him, end him, throttle him with my bare hands and fuck his throat until the light goes out of those black eyes._

With a fresh cup of tea and a sleeve of biscuits, Sherlock returns to the sofa, and separates the newspaper into sections. As is his habit, the first thing he looks at is the personals. Anyone placing a personal ad these days, when the internet is basically just one huge “M seeking W” listing, is a story—a tiny, pathetic story, to be honest, but something to untangle. He can look at those, make some lightning deductions, get his feet back under him. John will be home in a few hours; Sherlock just needs to hang in there until then. John can help, just as Sherlock helped John. Symbiosis. _We are lichen, metabolizing each other's nightmares, growing where nothing can grow_.

Animal hoarder. (Boring.) Lost military spouse who has actually merely found someone else. (Dull.) Recent immigrant from south China, non-traditional appearance, needs wife to show to mum and dad to convince them he’s not gay. (Not bad, but ultimately trite.) Love to Gran. (Bah!) And, under missed connections:

_S: Me seeking you._

_Nothing on tv tonight; take a look._

_Come play._

_For you, I am aflame._

_Let's keep playing that losing game._

_[box 09-66742789]_

Sherlock’s lip twitches into an involuntary sneer, and he snatches up the entertainment section. He flicks his eyes over the TV listings.

**“Charlie X.”**

It feels like an expertly thrown punch to the solar plexus.   
 ****

Sherlock gets the cigarettes back out, lights one, and with smoke trickling from his lips, calls the newspaper’s personal advertisement number, which he's had memorized since childhood. There's no live human on the other end anymore, though; only a computer-generated voice, a robot instructing him to enter the listing number using his telephone keypad.

Zero, nine, M-O-R-I-A-R-T-Y.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Sherlock shouts. He doesn't notice that his headache and nausea are gone, or that he's grinning. 

The text reply buzzes his phone too soon to be anything but pre-programmed.

**hello sexy -sixteen- whips T new born ward come play or baby boom strawberry jam <3 daddy**

The message slots neatly into cold comprehension. 

Sherlock flows thoughtlessly into socks, shoes, and his coat. Like he’s only been waiting for the summons. He pockets his phone, the cigarettes, and a packet of matches, stands paused before the spread newspapers. Carefully, using his fingernails, he tears out the TV programme listing and sets it atop the television. He makes it to the doorway before turning back, vaccilating. In the back of his mind, he hears John's voice, pleading, _Don’t do this._

The phone vibrates again, making up his mind.

**sweetheart im getting bored. now get going.**

Sherlock hastily writes an apology on another scrap of paper, and adheres the messages to the TV with dabs of his saliva. Not too obvious, nothing that will mar the screen; must protect the telly.

He hails a taxi, sweat already beading on his forehead, though the weather is only mild. “Whipps Cross Hospital,” Sherlock snaps to the driver, sliding inside, holding up a fifty-pound note against the glass. “Please make haste. Lives are at stake.”

The journey to Leytonstone seems to take decades. With every passing mile Sherlock grows more tense, more itchy, every cell in his body crying out for some kind of stimulation or release. He comes close to asking the taxi driver to stop for a moment so that he can smoke a cigarette, but distracts himself by recalling the specific atomic weight of every element in the periodic table, backwards from _ununoctium_ , regretting having left his nicotine patches in Baker Street. 

Upon arrival, Sherlock leaves the money on his seat; with a swirl of his coat hem he leaps from the cab, rushing towards the building housing the obstetrics department. Raw need hammers in his ears, forcing him to pause, just a second, to light a cigarette. His hands tremble, and the smoke hurts his chest just so. 

_yes oh god yes an orgasm in every cell_

He smokes all the way into the concrete shadows of the car park, into the lift car itself, inhaling as deeply as a yogi falling into a trance. The tips of his fingers heat as he reaches the top floor, and, with a sneer, crushes the fag end into the NO SMOKING sign. 

The hospital wing seems deserted. Eerie on this well-lit, sunny afternoon. It’s funereal. Monitors beep faintly in the distance. Sherlock pops up the collar of his coat—show time—and heads to room 16.

The room contains twelve bassinets, all but one containing a newborn baby lying on soft mattresses and covered lightly with knitted cotton blankets. Some of the babies are crying, but not in a distressed way, more of a general whinge of displeasure at being alive and not currently attached to a warm breast; others sleep peacefully. 

The remaining baby, wrapped in a fussy pink blanket, is being held in the arms of a deeply suntanned teenager, dressed in full early nineties rave kit—a huge acid-yellow Stüssy hoodie, snap-back cap worn backwards over sandy-blond hair, plastic whistle, baggy jeans worn at a sag, pink platform sneakers, varnished fingernails, glitter on his face, eyes ringed with half-rubbed-off mascara. He's wearing a skin-tight T-shirt bearing an image of Salvador Dalì and the artist’s famous quote, _“I_ _am_ _drugs.”_ Underneath that, hand-appended in thick red marker: DO ME.

Humming an aimless tune, the raver gently sways the baby. In the baby's blanket, not too well hidden, is a blinking explosive mine of the type anyone could get on weekend-warrior websites. Similar devices wink at Sherlock from the underside of every bed. 

"I'm here," Sherlock says.

Neon-green waistband on the rave kid’s underpants.

The kid raises his head to meet Sherlock's gaze. In a shimmering, oily movement, he stands erect, raises his head, smirks, and becomes James Moriarty.  _Becoming_ him, not simply regaining his resemblance to himself, but adding years, facial lines, snakelike menace. If Sherlock had passed him on the street before, he would never have recognized him. _Even he_. Sherlock bites the inside of his lower lip. He is slipping; he should have caught that.

"What," Sherlock bites out, "do you want."

"Oh, there you are, darling," answers Jim, brightly, conversationally. He bounces the baby. "Miss me?"

“Not even remotely.”

"Spoilsport." Jim pouts, as if Sherlock had forgotten his birthday, or gotten vanilla instead of chocolate. The details of the abduction crash unbidden into Sherlock’s mind . . . _that cock! His semen all over my face . . . sweet-scented hormonal nightmare . . . The morphine . . . the fear . . . I loved it . . . like nothing else—! NO. STOP. NOW._

Sherlock blinks a few times, forcing himself to focus on the present danger. To get back into character. The role. The lead in this dance. "Not exactly . . . Westwood, is it?" he drawls, raising an eyebrow at the hoodie and baggy jeans, doing his best Mycroft impersonation.

Moriarty rolls his eyes like a rebellious teenager in the presence of squares. "It's _vintage,_ yeah?" He raises his eyebrows in mock surprise. "You don't like it? Doesn't bring back any pleasant memories of your university salad days?" Sherlock says nothing, and Moriarty sighs dramatically. "Besides, it's dazzle camouflage. And it worked. You _were_ dazzled; admit it.” Sherlock just stares, and Moriarty huffs impatiently, “You’re just no fun, are you? _Any_ way.” He turns the baby to face Sherlock. “This is Naomi Adele Fielder. Naomi, Sherlock; Sherlock, Naomi. ‘Hi, Sherlock!’”  Moriarty squeaks, flapping the baby's hand. “Her mummy’s in the ICU, just like the mums of all the tiny angels in this room. It’s where they put them, room sixteen. Car accidents, overdoses, pre-eclampsia – all sorts of nasties can take out a pregnant woman at term. Isn’t it _just so fucking tragic_? Shame to lose your mummy before you've ever really met her, isn't it? Although, if Naomi and her mates were to die as well, that _would_ take care of _that_ problem. So it _could_ be viewed as a supremely humanitarian act. What do you think?” 

Abruptly, he hands the baby to Sherlock. Grimacing, Sherlock holds the infant at arm’s length. She wakes up and begins to squall in that eerie, tearless newborn way. 

"Oh, dear," Moriarty clucks, reaching into the pockets of his hoodie. When his hands emerge, one palm contains what looks like a small torch, the other a familiar plastic cocaine bullet. Sherlock perceives them without looking at them directly, holding Moriarty’s gaze, grateful that it can't be seen that his mouth has begun to water.

“Okay, here’s the situation,” Moriarty says. “If you don't come with me, each and every maternity ward in London will blow simultaneously. Not just this one; all of them.” He pauses, gives it a moment to sink in. “All the ickle babies. Poof! I mean, us too, but who cares about _that_.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “You're bluffing,” he says with a nonchalance he doesn’t feel.

“Might be,” Moriarty replies airily. “How often do I bluff? Best not take the chance. Now, I’m guessing you _don’t_ want to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents, and I’m pretty sure you _do_ want to get high. Super easy decision to make. We’ll have a city full of Cajun blackened baby unless I give the signal to, as they say, _abort_.” Moriarty breaks into giggles at his own joke, and as instantly and artificially as a steel door slamming down, his expression becomes empty again. 

Sherlock must swallow before he can speak. _cocainecocainecocaine._ “I hate repeating myself.”

“So don’t. Do something you’ve not done before. Spend the night with me. Of your own accord. See, I’ve got a few doses of a new bit of gear I whipped up just for us. It’s right up your alley; a new phenethylamine compound that's dreamy, and peppy, and tasty, and sexy, and thoughtful, and it’s just _tits_ , is what I’m saying. And no one else has it. I only want to share it with you.” The good-natured smile returns. There’s almost something genuine behind it, something human. When he speaks again, his voice is American, a California dude, lazily moneyed, his accent flawless. “I gotta room with a view, a bottle o’ Chateau Lafitte, a coupla other party favors, a bangin’ stereo system, and a place to lay down. A fun night, in other words. _And_ a nice parting gift for you, if you want to play the home version of our game. What do you say?” 

"You've not left much choice there," Sherlock mutters. He wants to set the baby down, but is afraid that jostling might set off the charge. 

“No, I haven't, have I? Oooh!” Moriarty coos, shivering pleasurably. “I love it when I’m nasty!” He holds up the unknown object, now recognizable as a remote trigger with a red button on one end and a short antenna on the other. Off-the-shelf tech. Cheap. Difficult but not impossible to trace. Effective at its simple function.

Sherlock really wants another cigarette.

“Well? We've run out of time. Coming?” Moriarty chirps. He wrinkles his nose at the baby. “ _She’s_ not invited. You can put her down; nothing’s going to explode unless _you_ do the wrong thing.”

Sherlock gently settles the baby in the empty bassinet. She stops crying and stares at him accusingly. He's seized with the urge to apologize, explain that he is a drug addict, that he’s a detective, he’s undercover, he’s got a reason to be doing all this.

Moriarty edges up behind him, takes a sniff from the bullet, and hands it to Sherlock. “Have some,” he whispers, staring at him and flicking his thumb against the trigger's red button.

Without hesitation, Sherlock puts the bullet to his nostril and inhales. 

It's pure. Floats into his nose like a stray ferrule from a feather from an angel's wing; he can all but picture the iridescent microscopic flakes. He hits it again with the other nostril, then again with the first. A smile melts onto his lips as the left side of his face goes numb and his brain, for what feels the first time in aeons, comes fully alive.

Sherlock slides the bullet into the inner pocket of his coat. He considers the fact that he is eagerly lying down in a trap, and lowers his chin in the slightest hint of a nod. 

Moriarty’s eyes glitter. “Yes, it _is_ delicious, isn’t it? I’m excited, too. Let’s go.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is taking so long. I've got issues. But I'm committed to getting the next chapter out as soon as possible. Originally this chapter was going to be much longer, but I decided to break it in half so I can post something sooner. The next chapter is when we get to the fireworks factory, as it were. I know; I'm a rotten tease.
> 
> "I love it when I'm nasty" is a line said by Ratigan, the Moriarty analogue in the film THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE. Other Ratigan (and other corny supervillain) quotes will show up as we go along, because Ratigan is the greatest, and I think the two realities should overlap, even if it's a ginormous paradox. Heh heh.
> 
> Comments are love. Even if you hate it, comment.


	3. Revelation (A study in duality)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We have arrived at the fireworks factory.  
> Sex, drugs, quips, confessions, kung fu, baths, avant-garde pop music, and fine art—Moriarty shows Sherlock the best and worst time of his life, and the game he's playing may well be playing *him*. Seriously dark times. Heed warnings.

Sherlock slides the cocaine bullet into the inner pocket of his coat. He spares a moment to consider the fact that he is eagerly lying down in a trap, and lowers his chin in the slightest hint of a nod of acceptance. Moriarty’s eyes glitter. “Yes, it _is_ delicious, isn’t it? I’m excited, too. Let’s go.” 

Someone’s in the hallway outside the newborn ward: a cleaning woman in modified scrubs uniform and trainers, downcast young face, South Asian, her posture vaguely askew as she pushes a cart laden with spray bottles and folded, worn cloths. Moriarty strides to her side, spins her, and kisses her cheek. The woman shows only a stiff non-reaction. “Make the call,” Moriarty says softly, but loud enough for Sherlock to hear. “Sorry, my pet; not today.” The woman sharply glares at him, her mouth hard and set. Moriarty shrugs. “I’ll give you another chance, I promise. It won’t be much longer.”

“You bastard,” she whispers, seizes her cart, and rushes away.

Moriarty shrugs, instantly back in rave-kid character, and leans against the wall next to the lift, head bobbing to some beat only he can hear. He catches Sherlock observing him, and nods in the direction that the woman fled. “Your deduction?”

“Thwarted suicide,” Sherlock replies coolly. “Miscarriage; disappointed her husband and family. Healed injuries indicate domestic violence. Looking for a way out.”

“ _Multiple_ miscarriages,” Moriarty corrects, grinning. “Terrible situation. Met her at a support group; she couldn’t bring herself to go in, so I bought her a drink and asked her what she really wanted, more than anything. You ask me, I think she should walk away, disappear, go be a hippie in Goa. Regain contact with her Buddha nature, like. Unfortunately she’s actually a Hindu, and they’ve not _half_ got the Irish beat on familial guilt.” He laughs, all sunny charm. When the lift arrives, he sketches a bow and indicates for Sherlock to go ahead.

Sherlock smiles sourly. “Did you remember to turn Ireland back on?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah, thanks, almost forgot.” Moriarty pulls out his mobile, and taps the screen. “The cunts should be grateful. It was a beautiful day out—get some fresh air, go down the pub, have a banal conversation about it all. ‘Internet’s out!’ Blah blah blah. Oh, by the way, did you like my little Star Trek joke?”

Sherlock did not actually get it. “Infantile nonsense.”

“Jolly good _fun_ , you mean! That’s not even what’s showing. Four-twenty? I thought it was cute. Bribery makes anything possible. Extra, extra, read all about it, special edition, just for _you_ , darling. Give us the bullet, there’s a love?”

“No.” Sherlock takes a hit himself, and then another. He has started to feel quite good, tingly and dreamy and numb, enough so that he doesn’t protest when Moriarty plucks the bullet away from him. “Was your father really a professor at Trinity?” Sherlock asks, rubbing his nostrils.

“Don’t you want me to retain _any_ mystery?” Moriarty takes two sniffs of coke and sighs. “What’s it matter anyway. There’s no answer to me _._ There isn’t a word to describe what I am.”

“Thomas Harris, _The Silence of the Lambs_ ,” Sherlock attributes.

“Good!” Moriarty claps his hands. “I figured you might get at least one reference out of the hundred I’ve dropped on you since you walked in the door. Jesus Christ, Shirley, you one basic bitch.”

“Discriminate,” Sherlock corrects.

“ _Limited_. Science fiction is the literature of ideas. Watch _Star Trek_. Honestly; it’s great.” Out of the elevator, Moriarty walks into the car park, pausing next to a spotless, gleaming black BMW sedan, bearing diplomatic license plates. With a faint click—nothing so plebeian as a “tweet-tweet”—the doors unlock. “Please,” Moriarty says, indicating the passenger side. “Unless you’d prefer to ride in the back. Get your poshie realness on, yeah?”

“No, thank you.” Sherlock gets into the car, glancing round its fine interior, upholstery like a gentle hand caressing his arse and thighs. Bulletproof glass and a high-tech dashboard. “From the Dorchester Hotel’s V.I.P. fleet,” he recognizes. “Stolen?”

“More like a drive-away. I’ll give it back, promise.” As they progress forward into the sunlight, Moriarty pulls off the trucker cap, and the fringe of blond hair with it, revealing his own slicked-down black hair. A bit of tan-coloured makeup has smudged off at the temple. He tosses the hat into the backseat, and pokes at the dashboard; energetic electronic dance music swirls into being. “Hope you don’t mind the Shamen,” Moriarty says. “Flashback again. I put on the trainers and I couldn’t resist. Indulge me.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and sighs enormously.

“Have a smoke,” Moriarty adds, “but not your stale French bollocks; fresh pack of Marlboros in the glovebox. And light one for me, would you.”

Sherlock holds two cigarettes between his lips and lights both from the same match. He hands one over. The tinted windows ease down several inches, and Moriarty even slings one elbow out the window, sitting back, completely at ease, singing along softly, “ _This is how I make it, make it mine . . . every time!_ ”

“Tell me about the phenethylamine,” Sherlock says abruptly, desperate to make him stop singing. “I thought Shulgin discovered every one.”

“No, no, no, not at all—he only made initial discoveries. You read Chem; you know about the possibilities.”

“ _You_ did _not_ read Chemistry,” Sherlock points out.

“That doesn’t mean I haven’t scientific curiosity and considerable lab skills,” Moriarty replies coolly, gulping in smoke for a circular inhale. “Just no academic interest. You tear things apart; I put them together.”

“Poisons, and the like,” Sherlock speculates.

“It can indeed be very useful knowledge,” Moriarty agrees. “In my line of work, especially.”

“Your line of work,” Sherlock replies darkly. “Terrorism.”

“Amongst other things.” Guiltlessly, Moriarty nods and hums assent. “It’s like any other profession,” he says, “except more fun.”

Sherlock feels a sick flutter of conscience in his belly. He snuffs it out. “Is there more cocaine?”

“It’s all gone,” Moriarty says, handing him the bullet anyway. “More back at mine. That was just to whet your appetite.”

“You really ought to get back to your _shaolinquan_ practices. You’ve gone a bit squidgy round the middle.”

Moriarty laughs uproariously. He says something in flawlessly accented Mandarin that roughly translates to _Bring it_. In English he continues, “I would love to show you my Through-The-Back Fist technique. I’m not sure how it would stack up against your jujitsu girly slap fighting, but I’d love to find out someday. Call it a date?”

“For someone who has studied subjects requiring such discipline,” Sherlock remarks, unscrewing the empty bullet, rubbing every loose molecule he finds onto his gums, “you certainly do operate in chaos.”

Moriarty just shrugs. “Whatever. I just get so _bored_. You know what I mean.”

They drive up onto the palatial grounds of the Dorchester Hotel. Rather than going to the front, however, Moriarty steers the car round the back of the main building, and directly into the car park. The attendant glances at him, then nods, glances nervously away. Moriarty gives a jaunty wave, tossing his cigarette butt out the window onto the spotless pavement. Up a level, he parks the car, and gets out without bothering to lock it behind him. The parking level is deserted; no other cars. The pavement is so mirror-smooth that it has to have been laid within the last month.

Moriarty leads Sherlock to another lift and presses the button. The doors open immediately to display a very plain brushed-steel box; on its control console, there is only one button. Up or down, no other choices; the opposite of whatever you are now. No emergency stop mechanism Sherlock can see.

His mouth waters as the fresh data floods into his mind.

“O, strong Sherlock! So stoic, like Virgil, descending into inferno,” Moriarty declares.

“ _Vuolsi così colà dove si puote_ …” Sherlock quotes from Dante in a half-involuntary mutter.

Moriarty nods and smiles, the baton successfully passed. “By the will of God, or at least, by me. Who’s to say we’re not one and the same?” He giggles. “At any rate,” he adds, as the lift stops, “let me show you my place. My temporary home away from home, away from home…” He laughs and continues dreamily, “Away from home.”

Sherlock steps directly into a suite that shouldn’t exist.

Sherlock’s been inside the Dorchester Hotel countless times since childhood, even four times this year alone. Everyone has stayed there, from royals to O.J. Simpson; it can be a hotbed of crimes of all types. He has pored over blueprints until he could find his way round the place with his eyes closed. And this room, this whole enormous suite, the size of an entire half a floor, doesn’t show up, even on the maps provided to the fire brigade.

It looks completely unlike any of the rest of the hotel. This room takes minimalism to its most absurd heights. Plain dull-white walls; ceilings not quite as high as in other suites; matte black uncarpeted floor; almost no furniture or decor of any kind, but featuring dramatic floor-to-ceiling windows, as if the unobstructed view of the City is the only decor necessary. Sherlock loves and hates it with an intensity that makes the morning’s nausea return. On the wall to his left, from where they just stepped out of the lift, hangs a massive, brightly-colored painting that looks at first like a mandala or tile mosaic, but as the afternoon light illuminates it more clearly Sherlock realizes that the canvas has been completely covered with real butterfly wings.

“You like my Hirst?” Moriarty drawls, coming round from behind the startled and horrified Sherlock. “That’s temporary, too. It’s sort of in a state of having been _pawned_. By a whole country! Heh! I dunno, maybe I’ll keep it. Or burn it. Can’t decide.” Moriarty looks at the artwork without seeming to feel anything, then shrugs, sighs, and unzips his hoodie. 

“It really pulls the room together, don’t you think,” he continues. “Bit of colour in this crypt. Not my design. I would never’ve . . .not for my own home, you know? If I had one. _You’ve_ got a home, haven’t ya. It’s where you know where you are. Can’t fault me for wanting that. Me? No home. Technically, I don’t really _exist_. But this place does it for me when I’m in the area. Got it for a steal from the Sultan of Brunei. Well, not really a steal; more of a gift, a nice bit of blackmail. I told him his wife was fucking the valet. She _wasn’t_ , of course, but he’d have been rid of her sooner or later, anyway. A television presenter. Such a cliché. Everyone wants the bint from the telly. Anyway, I could get the whole hotel from him, if I wanted. But–it’s like the Hirst. Or the car. I could have anything in the world I want, just for the polite asking. Thus, it’s all meaningless. It’s just _stuff_.” He spreads his arms wide, taking in all of creation, everything his, the whole world, his. “What I seek is the unique experience. Camaraderie. Triumph. _Fun!_ ”

“You’re one of those people who talks constantly when you’re high, aren’t you?” Sherlock comments.

“Heh! So ungrateful. All the things I’ve done for you.” Moriarty taps his phone screen again. Moving automatically, the ceiling-to-floor thick brown curtains draw themselves shut, plunging the suite into semi-darkness. A thin column of light defines itself where the curtains gap, painting a bright stripe over the glittering mandala of butterflies. It is too artful to be coincidental – everything in the room has to be perfectly engineered, measured down to the centimeter, to produce this effect.

“Take off your clothes,” Moriarty says, pulling off his own shoes, losing a few inches of platformed height.

“What?” Sherlock says.

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Moriarty replies mockingly. “You heard me. Clothes. Off. Strip. Nudies. Everything. See? I’m doing it.” The jeans slump down, the T-shirt stripped off a pale torso mapped with fine black hair; then off go the green pants, Moriarty’s cock and balls dropping heavily between his thighs, quivering as he pulls off rainbow-striped socks. “A guarantee of safety,” he continues. “No wires; no weapons. Just us. As I promised.”

At first Sherlock tries not to stare, then decides he will, anyway. It is only a penis, a collection of soft tissues, no more interesting and no less charged with meaning than a nostril, a foot, an earlobe. Biology, physiology. A naked Dubliner with bronzer and glitter on his face and hands. Wouldn’t be his first time.

_Remember, Mad Monk? Remember? Sex all the time. Sex and candy and so many lessons on human intimacy. Tied up and blindfolded and plugged port and aft, inviting the cuts from the whip and the cane, fucking anyone for drugs, fucking anyone for any reason or no reason, mind scrambled and smoothed out, indulging madness, cultivating it, looping it back on itself and watching the behaviour as if from a distance and thinking “That person is addicted to death and it can’t end well” and . . ._

Sherlock’s fingers slowly find their way to his jacket, to his shirt buttons. Moriarty watches, impassively curious, unsmiling. Almost respectful. “Although,” he breaks in abruptly, making Sherlock tense in surprise, “maybe we should do thorough cavity searches, just in case–what do you think?” 

“Wash your face,” Sherlock snipes back, irritated. “You look like you’ve been rimming an incontinent elephant.”

“That’s the spirit! I’m trying to get you out of your head for a bit. _Relax_ , for fuck’s sake.” Turning away with an impish smile, Moriarty pads barefoot towards the kitchen. “Anyway, d’you want a drink? I’m having one.” He’s got the slim, finely-muscled body of a once-dedicated martial artist, now out of practice, having gained just a trace of flesh, of softness. He hasn’t had to fight for his life recently, but in the past, for sure—he’s got old scars from bullet wounds, and a jagged arc across his back where it looks like someone was trying to remove a kidney with a kitchen knife that looks like it could be twelve, perhaps fifteen years old. It might have happened while he was at Cambridge, spying on sex parties, watching from the shadows. Watching Sherlock.

“I _need_ more cocaine or this ends now,” Sherlock says through gritted teeth.

Jim just chuckles. “Yeah, yeah, Shirley Snowflake. You’re so demanding. Wash your face; get me drugs; get it hard so I can see how big it gets. You posh whores are all the same _._ ”

Obligingly, though, he stands at the sink and scrubs his hands and face with soap. He finishes by ruffling his hands through his hair. With his black fringe winking shaggy over his brow, he transforms again, looking ten years younger again, all clean-shaven, dimpled, roses-and-cream complexion and crooked smile. You know– _Jim_. Cute, harmless, a bit shy. Sherlock’s last count had him responsible for ninety-two deaths.

“You sure you don’t want a glass? It’s the only bottle in London.” Moriarty skillfully keys the cork from a bottle of ’89 Chateau Lafitte and pours a measure into a glass. He gives it a cursory swirl and knocks it back. “Meh. Needs to breathe. Now—before we go mountain-climbing, I advise you to leave the _yayo_ alone until after we’ve had our first hit. The drugs _do_ play nicely together, but honestly, with this lovely stuff, you won’t need it. Of course it’s not about what’s _needed_ , is it.”

“Fine. Now, please. My patience is at an end.”

Moriarty turns on the light over the length of plain white Formica worktop next to the sink. From a cabinet underneath, he pulls out a blue Fila gym bag and sets it on the worktop. From the bag he draws out a black plastic clinician’s case, containing ten new syringes still wrapped in plastic, and several small brown glass vials. There’s also a small white mortar and pestle, lab spoons, glass beakers wrapped in newspaper. Sherlock’s heart rate accelerates at the sight of scientific equipment. “You’re going to make it here?” he asks.

“Well, yeah,” Jim replies simply, his attention mostly absorbed by the canisters and beakers. “Like punch.” He tosses one of the glass canisters to Sherlock. “Oh. And here’s your stupid, boring cocaine.”

Sherlock taps out a tiny bump onto his thumbnail, and sniffs it. More of the same glorious stuff. He taps another and inhales, and another, like eating popcorn at the cinema, watching Moriarty’s chemical construction.

Jim empties the contents of the other vials—featureless powder—into the mortar bowl, and stirs them together. Satisfied by its appearance, he taps the mixture through a glass funnel into an empty beaker. “If you can set the blow down for a _brief_ moment, would you do me the favor of adding one hundred milliliters of distilled water.” He hands Sherlock a bottle, factory-sealed. 

Numb-lipped, his vision swimmy, Sherlock does as he’s been asked. “So you’re a drug kingpin, as well. I recognize the code of the bag pass. Marker stripes on the carrying strap. Five stripes, three different colors. Each of them had an item to add, and then it’s passed along to the next in line. Drop sites. They never see you. Or each other.”

“I wouldn’t say _kingpin_. More of a hobbyist.” Moriarty bites his lip, face aglow with excitement, concentrating on his task of stirring. Sherlock joltingly realizes that this is how he looks, crouched over a microscope, and wonders how John can stand it. “Now, if you would,” Moriarty says, “fill a syringe. One point two in each. If you want to be a real mensch, fill them all.”

"Five doses each?"

“We could do. If we want. And we probably will. It’s really fun shit. It’s a 2C. Brief duration. Maybe two hour peaks, six or eight altogether, and you can just boost and boost. And . . . We’ve got the weekend. Unless you’ve got other plans.”

Moriarty extends his arm, resting it palm up on the countertop. A few quick clenches of his fist, and the median cubital vein leaps up eagerly against the stretched skin at the juncture of his elbow. He’s got a row of older puncture wounds healing up his right arm, maybe two weeks old. _So, just before he got me the first time, he was doing this, developing this. Had the abduction been a practice run? A test? And who’s being tested?_  

Moriarty’s Dublin lilt breaks into Sherlock’s line of thought. “You should give me the first hit, so you can be assured that I’m not just shooting you up with, say, sodium persulfite.”

“Let me guess; you’ve done that before.”

Moriarty shrugs guilelessly. “I’m a bad man,” he says. “I’ve done bad things. And, yes, enjoyed some of them. In the vein, if you’d be so kind.”

Sherlock shakes his head, lips drawn tight over his teeth, his mind a blur of hatred and want. And fascination. This _is_ a holiday, almost, really. He looks at James Moriarty’s exposed vein, as green as the sea, wondering how far he would get if he just jammed the needle through flesh and bone and into the worktop.

“Don’t,” Jim replies in a whisper. “You’d not make it off the hotel grounds. Things wouldn’t turn out well for the other residents of your street, either. Or your friend . . . Greg, or something?” He gives a subtle, indulgent nod, like he’s a pope bestowing a blessing, and it’s all Sherlock can do not to punch him in the face. “Go on. They never have to know.”

Sherlock exhales and gently slips the needle under Moriarty’s skin, through the slight resistance of the blood vessel. With another careful breath, he plunges the syringe clear, and on the next exhalation pulls the needle free. He tosses it into the sink with a small shudder of loathing, like it’s a tiny dead animal. Jim casually folds his arm towards his chest and nods again. “Good,” he sighs. “Cheers.” In the next moment, he shudders, his eyeballs roll up behind his eyelids, his lips flush deep pink, and a goofy smile spreads across his face. “Ver-r-r-ry good,” he adds, laughing breathlessly. “S-so good. Oh, God, _try_ it, Sherlock. Oh, man. Results consistent. _Wicked_.”

Grimacing, but his own face flushed with eagerness, Sherlock holds out his own left arm, pokes the cubital space until his vein comes up, a little further down the arm, as there’s scarring there from before, but he’s not thinking about before, not really, just now, and how much he wants to get this over with, get high and get out of there before something genuinely terrible happens.

Smiling, glowing, James Moriarty watches Sherlock shoot up.

The tiny needle doesn’t feel like much. Through paper-thin skin and into vein, impress, and withdraw. For one second, nothing happens, but in the next, Sherlock suddenly and vividly hallucinates a glowing blue grid, like graph paper, superimposed over his vision. “Fuck!” he shouts in surprise, tossing his empty syringe into the sink as well. He blinks to make the grid go away, and it does, but the afterimage remains, as if branded on his retinas. “But it’s not real,” he says aloud. A jolt of nameless, unrecognizable emotion strikes him like lightning. Helplessly, he crumples onto the black floor, swamped with too much feeling at once. Self-loathing as black as he’d ever experienced is inundated with a massive candy-colored wave of absolute joy, mixing, turning muddy as a devastated village swirling into the lethal waters of a tsunami, and then all out to sea, and beautiful sparkling waves as far as the eye can see. “Fuck,” he says again, in a different tone of voice. He starts to laugh. He genuinely cannot help it, and he no longer wants to.

“Yeah,” Jim says warmly. “Right?”

“Oh,” says Sherlock, “yeah, I think so.”

They lie there, and melt, and laugh.

“I’m going to change the music,” Jim says. “You okay down there for a minute?”

Sherlock is temporarily unable to speak, or to even shake his head in the correct way, but once again Jim can read his thoughts and knows that he’s fine. Sherlock is looking at the beam of sunlight coming through the curtains, dust motes dancing in it like fireflies, and he has never really been more okay in his life.

“Takes a bit to get used to it,” Moriarty says. 

“I’m ah, okay,” Sherlock replies. “Ah! Good. I _can_ talk.”

“Thank heaven for _that_. Come lie in the sun with me.”

It’s a wonderful idea, a destination that can be reached by crawling. Positioned on their backs on the peculiarly spongy, springy floor, the sunbeam moves perpendicular to their bodies, a white stripe illuminating knees, slowly rising. “My God!” Sherlock bursts out. “It’s quarter-inch rubber flooring! The whole place could be a sparring ring!”

“I love that part. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d hand you your arse. I meant this weekend. I’ve trained in _wushu_ for fourteen years. Got good, too. I had to have something to do during my exile. Oh, Nauru!” Moriarty laughs and pokes the spongy floor with his elbow. “Beautiful island of Nauru. Now that’s my home away from home away from home. When getting away from it all is taken a little too . . . literally? It’s bloody _away_.”

“Why there? Besides the tropical island paradise aspect.”

“I had to get lost. _Proper_ lost. Waiting out the fallout after Nottingham. My first time dying. But while I was fucking off on the beach, I just happened to stumble across the most effective money-laundering mechanism on the planet. Who knew?”

“Ripe for exploitation,” Sherlock says. The sunlight warms his thighs divinely.

Moriarty laughs, too. “Ah, well, you know, it’s all in the game, isn’t it. I thought for a while about becoming a bounty hunter? And then I thought, it’d be better to administer. Set bounties, and have bounties brought to me. Or facilitate them. Pretty soon I didn’t have to do anything but set appointments and work on my Iron Palm. And then I got a commission from the president. And now, every single citizen of the island is on my payroll.”

“Oh, aren’t you just miraculous in every single way. You don’t just do the crime; you involve whole . . . nations.”

“It’s nothing personal,” Moriarty drawls. “Except when it’s personal.” He winks at Sherlock.

“What’d you do in Nottingham?” When Sherlock holds his hand to the sunbeam, he can see every vein, artery, and capillary, and a few major nerves as well. He feels that if he could squint in just the right way, he’d see blood cells stampeding through.

“Getting my first Ph.D. I’m a Doctor of Mathematics, you know?” He pauses for just long enough, and bursts into renewed laughter. It’s infectious, especially while Sherlock is lying down, tense and relaxed all at once, and the sun crawling up his thighs, and it’ll reach Moriarty’s cock first, as his legs are shorter, and his penis longer . . . “I had a few rings,” the man is saying, and in no way can Sherlock remember the beginning of that sentence, of that thought. Blood cells like butterflies, diverse in colour, flying around his body, ever in motion, contained. He hates that voice, and he loves that voice. “With specialties. Art, passports, intel . . . oh but the best ones are these kids I still work with these days. Diamond thieves. Not ordinary ones—best of the best. The elite. Schiphol? Those were my kids.”

“Tied Mycroft in knots,” Sherlock replies, impressed despite himself. “For _weeks_.”

Jim scoffed. “Victimless bloody crime.”

“Besides the African miners who died extracting those diamonds, of course.”

“Different crime. Not my scene. I agree, it’s appalling.”

“Must have netted you quite a bit of cash to fund your . . . corporation.”

“Oh,” Jim says airily, holding up a finger, “oh, but no, that was never the point. The diamonds aren’t for me. And that level of fencing doesn’t create much profit. I’m just an intermediary. I don’t _need_ money. No, it was just a project, just to see if it could be done. I had a laugh. Got to tell the bloke behind Antwerp, that Notarbartolo chap, that he wasn’t really ‘all that’ after all. A hundred million _dollars_ isn’t the same as a hundred million _euros_. And then he got caught, the imbecile. But it was a fun exercise. Also it looked great on my c.v. Back when I was still for hire, that is.”

“I’d like some of the wine now,” Sherlock says.

Moriarty scrambles up from the floor. “Allow me,” he chirps.

“Please don’t poison me,” Sherlock mumbles.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that to the wine.” 

He skips away–literally skipping–and presently returns bearing two glasses of the blood-red, cloudy liquid. Sherlock doesn’t want to sit up to drink it, and tries gently pouring it into his mouth while remaining flat on his back. Of course it spills over his face. Moriarty gracefully extends his hand, his finger, swiping up the drops and feeding them into his own mouth. He trails the cold, damp finger to Sherlock’s nipple, and sure enough, that makes Sherlock sit up. “No,” he says sharply.

Jim takes his hand away and smiles impishly. “Hush.”

Sitting up, Sherlock feels as though he enters into a completely new body, capable of strange and wondrous things, his thoughts flowing tracelessly from moment to moment. “This is truly remarkable,” Sherlock says, looking at his hands, holding them up to the light, stirring the air with his outstretched finger and watching the eddies. “This compound.”

“I _know_! I wish I could share my lab notes with you—you’d find it fascinating—but not only do I not want any interference from the filth, I also don’t want anyone else to know about it.”

“You aren’t going to commercialize it?” 

“Nah,” Jim says, shrugging. “I don’t need the money, I don’t need the hassle, and I don’t need the renown. All of which I’ve already got in immense spades. To be totally honest with you, Sherlock, darling, I am grateful for this little _holiday_? This is as close to a holiday as I get. I’m just run off my feet these days; _everybody_ wants _something_ done and nobody has a clue as to how to do it himself. Just, here and there all the fucking time; appointment after appointment, like, all day, every day. Half the bloody night. Planes, trains, and automobiles. It’s nice to be the most popular girl at the dance, but sometimes a lady’s feet hurt, you know?” He laughs to himself, sips his wine. He has also brought the vial of cocaine with him, and takes a hit of powder from under his fingernail. “Sometimes I do have to step in. I don’t like to.” Moriarty shrugs. “Except when I do. It gets . . . messy.”

Sherlock stares at him, so high it feels like he’s underwater, buffeted by a strong current, one way and then the other. He shrinks away from the blinding spindle of sunlight until his whole body is cloaked in cool shadow. “So you torture and manipulate people . . . all day long.”

“Well,” Jim admits with a little shrug, “ _yes_ , but I mean, so do you.”

At first Sherlock is stung—wants to protest—but then reconsiders, and accepts the surreal truth of it. “Fuck you,” is his only possible answer, and Moriarty chuckles. Sherlock drinks his glass of wine. The cocaine has ruined his palate and he might as well be drinking room-temperature Ribena, but he can’t bring himself to care. Alcohol may soften the jitters drawing his spine as tight as a bowstring. Moriarty lies back down in the sunbeam, this time lengthwise, his hand stroking the stripe of light that travels from his messy dark hair to his pubes and his cock. “Lucifer,” Sherlock says, hearing how his voice has slowed to a slurring mutter, “the hardest working man in the business . . . But I mean, come on, really. I shouldn’t think a man of your . . . renown . . . should have any trouble doing as he likes.” 

“Oh, I do,” Jim insists. “I _do_ do as I like. This is just my gift to you. Honestly. To thank you for being you. The only one I could have this with. The closest thing I have to an equal. A peer, you know. Just to sit with, spend time with. There’s no one else in the _world_.” He catches Sherlock’s eye and holds the gaze, his eyes illuminated, not black after all, but a murky shade of seaweed-green. He looks beautiful and unnatural, like a construction, not a being of flesh and blood. He looks like a child, all longing and hope. “Do you understand? Being all alone? Always?”

Sherlock takes a deep breath, trying to return to himself, searching for equilibrium. There isn’t any. He can’t even feel imprisoned, or frightened, or angry—just waves of nervous joy and disorientation, a longing for obliteration. “Let’s take another hit,” he says.

Moriarty laughs knowingly. “Not yet. Let’s not go for ego death until after nightfall, yeah? Let’s have a cigarette instead.”

They stand at the kitchen sink, smoking, leaning naked haunches against the cabinetry. “I can’t deal with this music,” Sherlock protests, holding his cigarette vertically so that he can watch the gorgeous curlicues of smoke rise from the solar heat of the lit end. “It’s too emotionally manipulative.”

“Hah! Poor Lemon Jelly. I only put it on in case you had a bad time out of the gate. You’re only the second person to have taken this drug. _My_ first time, it got on top of me a bit at first. But you’re fine, of course. Your head’s harder than mine.” Moriarty carefully rests his cigarette on the edge of the sink, and shuffles off to the side of the room where, cleverly tucked away behind a dull-white partition, some kind of stereo equipment stands.

Sherlock gasps as he recognizes the first strains of the Brandenburg Concerto, and sighs with relief. But then the music goes all strange, stretched out, spreading like an oil slick through time. Sherlock can see it, wobbling in the light like a translucent jelly.

“. . . fuck fuck fuck oh fuck . . .”

“. . . Now, now, love, let’s just lie down for a bit . . .”

Agitated to the point of panic, Sherlock would like nothing less. He tries to run a lap around the edges of the room. He only takes a few strides before the ground tilts and rushes happily up to meet him. Instinctively he tucks his limbs and rolls into the fall, ending sat up in the center of the floor, in the middle of the sunbeam. With a great shout of laughter, Sherlock gets to his feet. “It’s perfect,” he says. Everything he does is perfect. Straightening, he focuses on the glowing Hirst canvas. “How peculiar,” he remarks, and giggling, reaches for it, fingers outstretched, suddenly compelled to peel off some of the butterfly wings, undo the oppressive symmetry. 

Swift, like a striking snake, Moriarty slaps his arm down, and with the other hand shoves Sherlock’s shoulder so hard he falls to the ground again. “Ah, ah, ah,” Moriarty says, voice quiet and controlled. “Please don’t touch. It’s worth more to me in blackmail than you can possibly imagine.”

Sherlock just laughs, and rolls a somersault. “I’m surprised you care.”

“I don’t, really,” Jim replies. “I just want to see that person utterly destroyed, that’s all.”

“The music’s . . . all wrong . . .”

“Yes, that’s the point. Now come along. Bring the cigarettes.”

In another part of the suite, again in an alcove arranged so cleverly that its existence cannot be guessed by the view from the lift, there is a bed, not too large, its bedclothes some dark color, indistinguishable in the near-total darkness. Sherlock gratefully settles onto the bed, curling up defensively against the barrage of sensation. Momentarily, the mattress dips under Moriarty’s added weight, a soft blanket is draped over Sherlock’s legs. The touch continues unbroken from the knitted silk skimming Sherlock’s skin to Moriarty’s fingertips briskly rubbing the muscles of his legs. His fingertips rub and stroke and tap in time with the music, all liquid and strange. Sherlock thinks to tell him to stop, but can’t hang onto any thoughts for more than a moment. The massage feels amazing. _That’s right,_ Sherlock remembers; _this is like MDMA_. Dissolving his barriers of self.

“Just ride it out,” Jim whispers.

“I’m all right.” Except that now he’s touching back, and that can’t ever be right, can it? Cool-warm skin under his own palms; doesn’t it matter whose skin it is?

It does; it does not. Who he is, is who he was.

“Kiss me,” Sherlock says. “I need to test a theory.”

In theory: Jim Moriarty kisses like a monster, or a codfish, or a desperate animal in heat.

In practice, his mouth is a bit hard and a bit dry, firm questing kisses with audible smacks as punctuation, tongue rougher-textured than John’s, from recent smoking. But Sherlock tastes the rare wine at last upon Jim’s palate, grapes bottled when he was a child, preserved in secret darkness until this moment. Sherlock wants more of it, but can’t articulate if he wants more of the wine itself or if he wants it transmuted through a kiss. 

“Fuck,” he says when the kisses stop.

“You can,” Jim says. Legs entangled, with the silk blanket between them and Bach melting down the walls. “You will. Fuck me. The way you want. Give me everything you feel.”

“I’ll kill you,” Sherlock replies breathlessly.

Whispered urgently. “Give it to me.”

Sherlock pulls away, painfully, like pulling his tongue away from a frozen pole when he was a kid, and Mycroft laughing, and he throws a punch but it lands nowhere. He lurches away from the bed, back to the kitchen, to something familiar. He pours a new glass of wine. The sunbeam has moved enough that it only lights one edge of the square canvas, and to Sherlock it seems to drip with blood and gemstones. He has lost hours.

He holds himself tightly, missing John, missing home, wondering if he’ll ever see them again.

Moriarty walks up, face set in a disapproving frown. Without a word, he collects the prepared syringes in one hand, and retreats back to bed with them. Sherlock follows on his heels, regretting having let the man out of his sight, only to be greeted by the sight of him prepping a new injection by the glow of a tiny LED clip-on book light.

“You can do your own this time,” Jim says, rolling one over.

A pinch, and a whirling carousel that moves in every direction at once. Sherlock discovers himself clinging to Moriarty’s body like a barnacle on a rock, every limb enclosing the Irishman, who is rubbing his cheek back and forth against the fine gingery hair on Sherlock’s chest. “There, there,” Jim murmurs, “your pulse.” He chuckles langorously. “Your prick is rock hard. I love it.”

Sherlock wants to protest, but it’s all he can do to detatch from the warmth of Jim’s body, now slick with sweat from the embrace, and when Sherlock moves, he’s cold. He can’t talk, with too many things to say in his mouth, but again, Jim Moriarty reads his mind.

Jim runs a warm bath in the deep, square-sided concrete tub in the room behind the kitchen. Sherlock sinks in gratefully, the water’s temperature helping to regulate his own, and he doesn’t mind when Jim gets in, too. There’s room. 

“I am a swimmer, as well,” Sherlock says. “Why did he laugh at you? Carl Powers? Why did he laugh? Why was it necessary to kill him?”

A pale shape in the wet darkness. “It wasn’t necessary. Just desirable.”

“Why did he laugh? Was it your penis?”

Moriarty chuckled in slow incredulity. “Oh, Sherlock. Boys never laugh at each other’s _big_ cocks. I didn’t have a big cock then. I was wee.”

“Late bloomer?”

“Yeah, well, you saw. It wasn’t until I lay eyes on you that my hormones properly kicked in.”

“Fifteen?” Sherlock prompts.

“Oh, sixteen, going on seventeen, same as you. I know. I looked like a kid. That made me very popular in some quarters. I think my junk got so massive because it was being sucked so constantly.”

Sherlock shudders with disgust, even as his own hand moves to his own cock, and finds it as stiff as reported. The water smells marvelously of cedar and lemongrass. Moriarty smells of wine and Marlboros and that product he puts in his hair, now rinsing out, his head under the water, his mouth against Sherlock’s shoulder, fingers against his. 

“Hold on,” Moriarty whispers. “I want to watch it happen.”

“I thought you wanted me to fuck you,” Sherlock whispers back.

A slight pressure of the fingers. “I believe we can have both.”

“Ahhhh . . .!” Too much liquid, too much blood, too much of everything. He can’t breathe.

Hard, steady hands on his shoulders. “. . . There, there. I’ve stopped. Here’s a towel. Open your eyes. Is it too much? It’s so dark and quiet and cool. Open your eyes.” A chuckle. “I told you not to do so much cocaine.”

Out of the tub, dried off, lay in bed again, Sherlock throws an arm across his eyes. He can’t orient himself, but perhaps that’s better. Jim beside him, keeping a hand on him at all times, but not demanding—transmitting. Sherlock can feel it. Banked _qi_ , flowing from Jim’s gentle palm, pressing into his side. To break the connection, Sherlock abruptly rolls over, trapping Jim underneath him, and sucks his mouth into a wet, toothy perversion of a kiss. 

In here, in the illumination cast by an LED, Sherlock can see. 

Somewhat. A tangled dark fringe, and groomed eyebrows, and Jim’s lips swollen, bitten full. Sherlock grasps the fringe and pulls hard. Jim moans, eyes rolling wildly, and presses himself into Sherlock’s hip, that hard, heavy weight between his legs slotted into Sherlock’s inguinal crest. Fucking it. Dry skin on dry, clean skin. “Lovely,” Jim whispers. “Exactly and precisely _divine_.”

“Stop doing that,” Sherlock breathes.

“You’re right, darling. _This_ instead.”

Dry hands, the palms skimming his erection on each side, energy pouring out of him and into Sherlock’s cock, then the cool wetness of Jim’s mouth on the head, and his teeth gently on the shaft. Sherlock thinks he should jolt upwards, away, but only goes deeper inside, Jim licking and sucking his own fingers, mouth stretched wide around it all.

“Oh, fuck,” Sherlock whispers, hips moving in involuntary circles. “Oh, fuck.” Jim moans, hums, just for vibration’s sake, Sherlock is sure; he can feel it in the depths of his balls. “Well,” he says aloud, “look on the bright side; at least he’s not talking with a cock in his mouth.”

Jim laughs, pulling his mouth away, wiping his chin. “No, the best thing is—“

“Shut,” Sherlock snarls, “your fucking,” yanks Moriarty’s hair, pulling him forward and seating his cock between those lips again. “Mouth.” He thrusts forward, hitting the back of Jim’s palate. It’s worse than straight down his throat; it produces a hard, satisfying gag, the muscles of Jim’s mouth clamping down tight. Incredible. This truly _is_ a gift. Sherlock pulls his cock back out, and lands a satisfying slap against Jim’s face. “Oh, you don’t like it now?”

His enemy now wears the empty-eyed, slackjawed expression that Sherlock knows is truly the real one. “Fuck my arsehole,” Moriarty mutters, “like I fucking asked you to. ‘Cos you do what I tell you, don’t you.”

He can smell lube. Has been smelling it for a while, since they came from the bath. As he shoves Moriarty completely away, he sees that he’s got his hand between his legs, fingers agitating inside himself. Sherlock snarls again, maddened by the sight, snapshotted into his mind, again like a brand—this will be nearly impossible to delete. He needs more drugs. 

Sherlock tries to return to the kitchen, but Moriarty literally kicks his legs out from under him. Striking like a snake, too fast to see, once again, the bastard. Sherlock lands well, rolling out from it, but not quite to his feet. “You fucking idiot,” Moriarty says, “I’ve got them _here_. And no you don’t need another dose. You’re peaking your fucking head off. I can see it from here. Little cartoon birds twittering around your head. Hashtag: _fucking titted_.” He has amused himself so much that his harsh demeanor dissolves into laughter. “Get a glass of wine,” Moriarty concludes, lying back in an odalisque pose, showing off his small, curved waist and the dark jut of his erection. “Don’t make me get the benzos.”

“Don’t you have any proper music,” Sherlock grumbles.

Of course he gets lost in the other room. The sunbeam is almost gone, a vague orange shadow of its former self. If he sits in a particular spot in the room it becomes a camera obscura, and the skyline of London, just visible outside, appears upside down, and waving, merrily . . .

“Sherlock!” Jim calls, his voice a curious song. “You _forgot_ you were _punishing_ me!”

“ _This_ punishes you _more_ ,” Sherlock sing-songs back.

“That, to me, bespeaks a failure of imagination.” Jim sashays out, smoking a cigarette. “I’m sure there are all manner of. . . agonies you would love to visit upon me.” His erection has waned, but not completely. He pours himself more wine. “And there’s no music playing. Hasn’t been for a while.”

They are back in bed with cigarettes and wine, lying side by side, Sherlock now listening to the tiny sounds audible in the silence. Mostly it’s Moriarty’s breathing, though, or his swallowing, or the sounds of him fingering himself again. “You want some?” Moriarty whispers against his ear. “I love to do it. I love to feel the inside of you.”

“You are not going to fuck me.”

“No, no. My prick is your plaything. If you want it, seize it. If you despise it, smack it away from you.”

“Ah, so you’re a masochist.”

“That makes two of us. And, honestly, honeycakes, if there’s a more high-functioning pair of switches in the city right now, I don’t want to know.”

Inside his belly, Sherlock feels a twinge of rage, and tries to swallow it down. But why should he? He reaches over and slaps Jim again. In response, Sherlock expects a laugh and another randy comment, but what he gets is Jim slapping him back, a little harder than Sherlock had done, and glaring at him like an angry housecat. Sherlock strikes out again, only to be blocked by the barrier of Jim’s forearm. “Iron Palm,” Jim reminds him.

“How’s your Iron _Face_?”

“ _Cunt!_ ” 

In the ensuing struggle, Sherlock lands two or three punches, but none of them with the force he intends; Moriarty can wriggle like an eel in a very small space, evading and blocking effortlessly, the smile on his face growing with each touch of Sherlock’s knuckles on his eyebrow and cheek. And then Moriarty spits at him.

Sherlock grabs the smaller man by the shoulders and shoves him over onto his face, pressing his knee into the small of Jim’s back. Kicking his thighs apart. Getting in one decent, hard blow on the back of his dark head. “Fuck,” Sherlock hisses, “you.”

Shoves in as hard as he can.

Jim Moriarty groans with the depths of the oceans. Arching his back towards Sherlock, planting his knees on the beg, angling up. Sherlock grabs one wrist, then the other, pulling his arms behind his back, towards the spot that he had marked with his knee, a red spot rising there. He doesn’t even feel how Moriarty feels inside; it hardly seems to matter. 

It doesn’t. But it does. 

Moriarty’s been a whore. Sherlock can tell, because he, too, has been a whore. And was brilliant at it, of course, at least on the physical side of things. Moriarty’s been through it all—gentle johns that just wanted to treasure a beautiful boy they simultaneously pitied and admired; the clumsy ones who had never had sex with a man, or any anal sex at all, and insisted on being the top; the ones who wanted to injure and humiliate at least as much as they wanted to fuck. And the ones who knew what they were doing, who sought his pleasure equally with theirs. Sherlock is fucking him like the third option, and Jim is responding as though he’s the lattermost. “Stop it!” Sherlock shouts, cuffing the back of his head again, thrusting inside as hard and rough as he can coordinate himself to give, the purring of Jim’s laughter and moaning like barbs in Sherlock’s flesh, goading him on.

He fastens his hands around Moriarty’s neck and squeezes.

Underneath, Jim shudders in ecstasy, his internal muscles grasping and fluttering around Sherlock’s cock. “Yes,” Jim whispers, voice compressed to almost nothing. “Do–what you–want with me. Be as–cruel and rough as–as you like. See, it doesn’t _matter_ if you hurt _me_. I’m a fucking sex doll. I’m not even human. I don’t _exist_! Yes–do all the things you would never do to John; all the things that would demean John, scare him, injure him. Hurt him. Do them to _me_. Give me the punishments I deserve. That they _all_ deserve.”

That voice has returned. Sherlock can’t abide it. He swings a side punch and clocks Jim in the face. He can feel the fleshy crunch of the tissue inside Moriarty’s cheek splitting. Looking over his shoulder, the wild-eyed demon grins with bloodied teeth. Sherlock puts his hands back around his throat, jabbing into him below, and squeezes hard until Moriarty’s body goes limp underneath him. Sherlock sits back, tossing his head to clear the sweaty hair off his forehead, and bends over Moriarty, squinting to check his breath. Like a whirlwind, Jim wraps his legs around Sherlock’s waist and pulls him closer. “Fooled ya!” Jim declares, and spits some of his mouthful of blood at Sherlock’s face.

Sherlock feels outside himself, watching as his swollen hands land brutal slaps on Moriarty’s face, then onto the straining surface of his cock. At last, Moriarty cries out in pain, and Sherlock feels a great unwinding within himself, a dark satisfaction, a dreadful kind of understanding and kinship. _Your suffering is sweetness itself._

Jim screams into his fist crammed into his mouth, biting down until the skin turns white, his cock loosing sticky streams of pre-ejaculate against their bellies. The darkness inside Sherlock dips his finger into the fluid, tasting it, glossing his lips with it, tasting the drug in Moriarty’s bloodstream, laughing at the sickness and absurdity of it all. When Moriarty laughs back, Sherlock uses one hand to grasp onto Jim’s twitching cock and squeezes, hard, while the other hand flicks his middle fingernail stingingly against the wet head.

“Fuck me, bright boy,” Moriarty hisses shakily from between gritted, dark teeth, his eyes wet and black as infinity. “Break me. I’ll never have anyone again; wreck me for anyone else. Destroy me. Tear my arse apart.”

Growling, he shoves Moriarty back over onto his face and mounts him, feet planted against the floor, pounding into him viciously. Moriarty howls with unsimulated pain, fingers clenching the sheets. When Sherlock pauses for breath, Jim bucks back, moaning, "Please . . . don’t stop . . . still I breathe, still I move . . . Kill the beast. _Kill it!_ ”

Shoving his face down into the sheets, grinding it there, pale knees up to shoulders and the strain pulling the scar on his back taut and white, practically making the villain stand on his head, Sherlock follows instructions. He yanks at Moriarty’s hair, a handful coming loose in a clump in Sherlock’s hand. Shocked from his trance, Sherlock’s hips stop. Jim wriggles free and crawls to the wall, gasping and sobbing, and then breaking into ecstatic laughter. Sherlock stares, disoriented, his lower body trembling. Wearing a transcendent smile, Jim roughly strokes himself to completion, and catching his semen in his hands, smears it onto his own belly, and then onto Sherlock’s face, into Sherlock’s hair, into his own hair, on his own face.

Frustrated, Sherlock strikes Moriarty’s face again. Languidly, Moriarty licks the come from the corner of his mouth.

“I haven’t,” he sighs contentedly, flopping down onto the bed, “been fucked like that since the Blue Peter auditions . . .”

“You are sick,” Sherlock sighs.

The criminal nods. “I’ve exorcised you,” he says. “Now you’re virtuous. At least, a little more than you were. I was trade once, too, of course. You and I. . . we really are _just_ alike.”

“No,” Sherlock mutters, rolling away. “No.”

“Cigarette?”

“No . . .”

“Oh, that’s right, you haven’t come. I’m such a bad host.”

“No! No . . .”

That mouth again. And Sherlock so, so close; even snapped back to himself, he is a long way from sanity. He holds Moriarty’s sticky face steady, thrusts into his mouth, back towards his throat. No gagging now; he’s ready for it. It’s a shame. But it doesn’t matter. 

But it does.

With an agonized groan, Sherlock empties himself into the man’s eager, swallowing mouth. And the agony winks out of existence, swamped under the glory of a orgasm on drugs that heighten his senses so keenly he can feel the echo of his voice from the walls, and it smells of jasmine and cigarette tar.

Moriarty brings him water, a cool damp washcloth, and a cigarette, and allows Sherlock to bask in the bliss for as long as it lasts.

He even falls asleep, somehow, for a little while, and when he wakes he hears Moriarty singing in the bath. “ _Though it nearly took a miracle to get you to stay, it only took my little fingers to blow you away_.” Sherlock loves his voice. He hates it. It is beautiful. He rolls over and finds a syringe and a vein.

Somehow the sleep hadn’t clarified Sherlock’s mind, instead blurring it further, completely stripping his sense of the passage of time. For years he examines every inch of Moriarty’s skin, memorizing every scar, every mole and grouping of hair, and the tiny tattoo that he first mistakes as a mole—a little black rectangle, almost a square but not quite. “Halmos,” Moriarty explains softly, combing his fingers through Sherlock’s tangled hair. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

“Q.E.D.,” Sherlock replies. “End of proof. Also known as the ‘tombstone.’”

“And then I disappear in a puff of logic.”

“I have. . . no idea what you mean.”

“Darling, we simply _must_ expose you to a bit more pop culture.”

It is daylight. Sherlock can hear more activity in the hotel proper. He cannot hear it from the floor, and instead stretches himself along the inner wall. And then Moriarty puts on more absurd, angular electronic pop music, ruining everything, and then they are in hand-to-hand battle on the open stretch of floor in front of the windows, with the curtains open, pouring the blue-gold light of day onto their naked bodies. “Don’t worry,” Jim says, weaving gently in a sort of simplified _zui quan_ , or “drunken boxing” stance. “We can’t be seen. Windows are polarized—“ His words cut off in a huff as Sherlock’s shoulder strikes him mid-torso. And then Sherlock is staring at the ceiling, having been overcome and thrown so skillfully he didn’t even feel it, let alone see it coming. He bounds back to his feet and hops back and forth. 

“Again,” he says.

Later they lie in the sunlight strip again, holding bags of ice to their bleeding noses. Moriarty has two black eyes. They are very satisfying, and worthy of a few more kisses, flavored with the last of the Chateau Lafitte. 

“Tell me a secret,” Moriarty asks.

Sherlock thinks for a bit, then settles on a lie. “I masturbated to orgasm in every one of my last classes in college.” It had only been the last two, but it sounds good. “Now you tell me a secret,” he urges, holding ice against Moriarty’s ribs, where Sherlock had done his best to crack them for over an hour.

Moriarty crosses his eyes as if thinking impossibly hard, then, smiling, confesses in a whisper, “Carl Powers. . . wasn’t my first!”

“Let me guess,” Sherlock whispers back, “it was mummy and daddy.”

“Oh, now,” Moriarty murmurs, shrugging, “would be telling. I certainly thought about it. Didn’t you?” For a moment, his real expression returns. It’s so staggeringly ugly, hideous in contrast, that Sherlock closes his eyes. “Planned it. Didn’t you?”

Sherlock would love to say no. To just lie about it. “I merely mentally deleted them,” he says.

“You’re assuming that they’re dead somewhere. I love my mum and dad,” says Moriarty with what sounds like genuine sincerity. “They gave me a lot of opportunities,” he continues, voice vanishingly quiet. “I wasn’t just gonna _have_ them, like you did.”

“Oh it’s as simple and dull as class jealousy, is it?” Sherlock wonders if he’s beginning to sober up. He’s not sure when it is, or how much he’s done, and that’s the point of all this, isn’t it? He is talking to himself and Moriarty in the same voice. More drugs are needed. “You don’t have any skag, do you?”

“Heavens, no, Sherlock. Heroin is a filthy drug and I won’t have it near me. Anymore. It’s so _nineties_ , isn’t it. Have some charlie; should be some left, shouldn’t there?”

“Er . . . no, I don’t think so . . . And don’t call me Shirley again, or I swear I’ll break this wine glass on your cock,” Sherlock warns.

“Ooh,” says Moriarty, perking up. “Maybe later. I do have an oxycodone you can have. It’ll have to do.”

After the pill is located and ingested, Jim makes Sherlock come again and again, milking him, three fingers quirked up Sherlock’s arse and his silver tongue all over Sherlock’s cock, holding him there, commanding the flood to come until Sherlock runs dry but still feels the seizure in his guts and his brain until Sherlock begs him to stop, and Moriarty smiles and rewards him with semen-sticky kisses. Until night surrounds them again, the bed lit now only by the tiny green LED on a thermostat control, and Sherlock beats Moriarty’s backside black and blue with the heels of his palms, with closed fists, with the hard points of his pelvic bone, shoving Moriarty down with one hand while the other clenches his throat. Sherlock tastes blood more than once, and doesn’t know whose blood it is.

_This is how people die_ , he remembers hazily.

+++++++

In dark blue morning light, Sherlock wakes up again.

He is so stiff it’s hard to move. Even in the dim light, he can make out bruises all over him, all over Jim’s curved, sleeping back.

The floor is littered with torn paper, dirty towels, empty syringes, broken glass, beakers piled with cigarette butts. Part of what had made it possible for Sherlock to quit smoking the last time had been waking up in a room like this. And yet the smell’s much easier to take this time, with the kind of relentless air purification that happens at the exclusive Dorchester. He’s absolutely certain that he had not actually had the most depraved weekend at the hotel. All the same, he staggers into the bath area and viciously hoses himself down with the flexible shower attachment, wishing that he was inclined to vomit.

Washed, becoming more unpleasantly lucid by the minute, Sherlock finds his discarded clothes in the front room. This room is almost as bad, also coupled with several gauze squares soaked in blood scattered around, and at least a dozen shellacked butterfly wings. On the infernal stereo system, a recording of Satie’s Gnossiennes plays very quietly. Grimacing at the headache, at the loss of connection to–well, anything, really–Sherlock gets dressed.

Jim comes to the partition draped in a heavy bathrobe of the same color as the curtains and the bedsheets. He doesn’t look as bad as Sherlock had feared; the black eyes won’t be hard to conceal, and his swollen lips are unsplit. He looks more supremely post-coital than anything else. “You off, then?” he asks raspily.

Sherlock doesn’t see fit to reply.

“Thanks for the good time,” Jim says. “And . . . be sure to tell Mycroft I said ‘hi, I miss you, call me.’”

The smile–the twisted mask that most often lives atop the blankness, the void, the nothing-there of James Moriarty–returns. With a saucy wave, Moriarty goes back to bed. And starts snoring.

 Sherlock hurries to the lift, mashing the button with his aching hand.

_I need a cigarette._

_No, I_ **_don’t_ ** _–_

At the lift entrance, in the private parking garage, waits one of Mycroft’s infuriating fleet of cars. Sherlock wants to spit on its shiny surface, and also wants to throw himself bodily onto it and just ride it out of there. Instead he walks to the open door and gets in.

Rather than his brother, that woman he employs sits there, as dewy and alert as if it were lunchtime instead of five in the morning. For once he has her attention; she’s expressionless, and also holding a gun pointed at him. “You coming?” she asks.

“Obviously,” Sherlock mutters.

The car flows out of the lot, out onto the grounds, onto the streets, into London. Still staring at him, the woman pleasantly says, “You have a choice of destination: Home to Baker Street, where John Watson is waiting for you, or to a destination chosen by your brother Mr. Holmes, where you will be held for as long as he deems necessary.”

“Not the hospital?” Sherlock asks, staring out the window.

“It was decided that Dr. Watson was capable of looking after your immediate medical needs. I do believe there was something about ‘a rape kit this time.’”

“Useless,” Sherlock says. “He’s not the kind that can be taken down by DNA–will you please put the gun down?”

The woman just smiles. Her grip on the handgun is solid and unwavering. It’s not worth it. Sherlock tries to sink even further into the car seat. Even after their arrival at Baker Street, the assistant follows him up the stairs, watching his every move.

Sherlock climbs slowly, stalling for time. He hasn’t even given what he’s going to say to John a thought.

In the same moment, it occurs to Sherlock that Mycroft’s spies should have been able to see his abduction in the first place. He had been taken from just inside his own door; the cameras should have been able to track him, someone should have rescued him. Without realizing it, John flees from Sherlock’s consideration again, his mind overcome with a more interesting dilemma. 

Moriarty must have control over what Mycroft sees. 

Multiple Ph.Ds—perhaps one in network security. At Nottingham. Mycroft has eyes everywhere but perhaps not all the eyes are open at all times, and what controls the cameras?

“SHERLOCK.”

John stands in the center of 221b’s sitting room, arms crossed, lips pressed together so firmly that they disappear altogether.

“John,” Sherlock replies, grateful but wary.

“Did you wash?”

“Did I–“ Sherlock blinks in confusion.

“Did. You. Wash off evidence,” John says.

“There was rather a lot of it, so, yes,” says Sherlock.

Behind him, Mycroft’s lackey shuts the door quietly behind herself. Mrs. Hudson isn’t here; therefore she must be downstairs asleep. Sherlock mentally pats himself on the back for retaining some deductive skill.

John opens his mouth, then shuts it again without saying anything. When the words come, they rush out, so as to pre-empt anything coming from Sherlock. “This can’t happen again. Sherlock, it can’t. There’s only so much I can tolerate.”

“Out for breakfast? I’ll elaborate more later.” He begins shedding his clothes, right there in front of John, not bothering to be seductive or quick about it; he aches too much for that. John takes in the bruising on his forearms, shoulder, flank, and shins without comment, and without an ounce of the panicked sympathy he gave last time. Sherlock doesn’t expect it, and indeed, never wanted it in the first place. He opens his mouth and makes a spinning motion with thumb and forefinger, and John comprehends the gesture, and fetches a set of dry swabs and insta-seal plastic bags.

Sherlock doesn’t ask for assistance, taking care of swabbing his own mouth, anus, and foreskin, draws a blood sample, and begins to brush himself down over a white sheet, hoping to retrieve any loose hairs. “I feel optimistic,” Sherlock says conversationally, looking to John with a hopeful smile. “Definitely getting closer to what we need, I think. Ah, did you get my message?” He gestures to the TV and gives an exaggerated, “knowing conspirator” nod.

Instead of returning the nod, or the smile, John says, “You enjoyed yourself. Good. Glad someone had fun this weekend.” He spins on his heel, marches smartly up the stairs to his own room, and slams the door. Sherlock follows him with his eyes until the door closes, and slowly sinks down onto the white sheet as he hears John’s voice spill from the room. “Mycroft? Yeah. We need to talk about Sherlock. _Now_.”

 

…to be continued...

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Revelation” is the Damien Hirst artwork referenced. http://www.damienhirst.com/revelation
> 
> “Make It Mine” by Shamen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8gulG-SizA
> 
> The twisted Bach that Moriarty blows Sherlock’s mind with is “Fullness of Wind” by Brian Eno: http://youtu.be/z_VluBnUns8
> 
> In the bath Moriarty sings “Watching the Detectives” by Elvis Costello: http://youtu.be/Gj-CPouUAWo
> 
> Almost all major crimes referenced here are real ones and remain unsolved.


	4. We Know Where You Live

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's home, and in one piece, after a weekend in Moriarty's den of depravity. John does his best to put his own pieces together, with the help of Molly, Mrs. Hudson, a bottle of gin, a bunch of sedatives, and a terrible, awful confirmation of a suspicion.

_I’ve gotta stop_  
_the will is strong but the flesh is weak_  
_guess that’s it_  
_I’ve made my bed_  
_I’m lying in it_  
_and it’s eating me up_

—Atoms for Peace, “Default”

John Watson paces his bedroom, the hand holding the mobile up to his sweaty face shaking badly, as if he has just received a sudden and terrible shock. He hasn’t, really—he’s not shocked to see Sherlock lurch into 221B disheveled, covered in hickies and finger-bruises, and wearing the heavy-lidded eyes of a man filled with remorse after a multi-day bender of sex and drugs.

He’s not shocked. No, John is shaking with anger. He wishes for teeth to kick in, arms to dislocate, a nose to smash in with his forehead. He had had to rush away from Sherlock, or the detective risked becoming the recipient of a volcanic rage. John prided himself on his restraint and iron will, but the combination of love and worry and jealousy and relief and bone-deep fear had dragged John to the brink of striking out against the very thing that evoked those emotions in the first place.

So he’d scrambled up to his bedroom, slammed the door, and punched in the speed-dial he’d programmed for Mycroft Holmes. 33, for _FF, fat fuck._ (He couldn’t help it. Sherlock’s bad habits have already seeped into John’s mind and it’s too late to shake them now.)

The elder Holmes answers on the first ring. “John. I trust my brother has returned to Baker Street.” His voice is as calm and superior as always.

John has to punch the wall. Just a little bit. _Has_ to. _Skinny-fat fuck._ “Mycroft? Yeah. We need to talk about Sherlock. Now.”

“Yes,” Mycroft agrees slowly, resignedly. “We do.”

John grimaces at his knuckles.

“But first, it is imperative that you don’t take your eyes off him. Do not let him leave the flat unattended, and do not leave him unattended in the flat itself. I have rung for Ms. Hooper to come round and assist you. Go back downstairs. Immediately.”

“How do you know where I am?” John demands.

“Do it now, John. His safety is at stake. Please. Explanations can wait.”

John rings off, and almost throws the phone against the wall before he remembers that it might behoove him to keep it intact and on his person. Shoving the phone in the pocket of his jeans, John opens his door and returns to the sitting room. He’s put the phone on the same side as the gun in the pocket of his jacket, and they softly click together as he descends.

At the sound, Sherlock glances up. 

He remains just where he was, nude and sitting on a plain white bedsheet, one of the stack he keeps in a closet and does not use as bedding. Clearly they are earmarked for the gathering of evidence. He has put the used and bagged swabs from various parts of his body onto the ground beside him, arranged neatly. In the increasing morning light, John can see even more of Sherlock’s tiny injuries—finger marks on the back of his neck (from being choked, roughly, with those weird little hands), cigarette burns in a pattern on his back (neatly highlighting the metal whip marks already on Sherlock’s back, now clearly spelling out “MINE”, complete with serifs), needle marks chewing up the crooks of his elbows. More finger marks on his hips. The arcs of bite marks, magenta divots on the alabaster skin of Sherlock’s buttocks. Bruises atop bruises. 

Moriarty had torn him apart and feasted on him like a vampire.

Wordlessly, Sherlock angles his head towards the line of plastic bags. “Shall we drop these by on our way to get food? I could really use a coffee,” he says conversationally, the sound of his voice all wrong coming from the gray and miserable face, the eyes begging John for some kind of understanding that John just can’t grasp.

“We’re not going anywhere, Sherlock,” John informs him.

The front door opens, unknocked, and Mrs. Hudson pops her head in. “Boys?” she calls, her strident voice far too loud for the room, even if it’s not above normal speaking volume.  
“I heard the door; is Sherlock—“ She spots the man of the hour, naked and spread-eagled on the floor right in front of her. “Oh, blimey!” she yelps.

John springs into action. “Sorry, sorry,” he tries to explain, approaching her. Rather than just going away, as John had hoped, the landlady instead comes in and just keeps her back to Sherlock. “He’s just got in, I’m sorry for this, I’m—He’s just—uh.”

Sherlock stands up and comes towards them both, too tall, swaying unsteadily on his feet. “Mrs. Hudson, I do think it would be best if—“ His penis wobbles out, looking about ten feet long, as inappropriate as possible.

“Sherlock, for fuck’s sake,” John shouts.

“Sherlock, please!” Mrs. Hudson cries, waving her hands in front of her face like she’s erasing a chalkboard. “I’m glad to see you’re all right, but do please put something on and—and stop being so horrible! John’s a good man and he loves you! Just—” She glances tearfully at John, and rushes away.

“Mrs. Hudson,” John shouts, going after her, but only makes it to the doorway before he sees her flee into her own flat and firmly shut the door behind her. John stares at the ceiling for a moment, fingertips gently touching the safety of the gun in his pocket, reassuring himself again that the safety is on, before returning to 221B.

“It’s not even as though she’s never seen me naked before, John,” Sherlock snaps, returning to the sheet, and gathering it carefully from the four corners, preserving whatever happened to come off him and onto it. “Serves her right for snooping.”

“Snooping! She’s been terrified for your life for almost three full days, Sherlock! It’s concern! As much as you care.”

“Caring is not an advantage,” Sherlock reminds him, even holding up one didactic finger. He expertly folds the sheet into sixteenths, and slides it into another, larger evidence bag, adding it to the pile. He even takes John’s hand and leads him to the pile, pointing at it, then out the door.

John does not blink. “So you want me to clean up.”

Sherlock glares impatiently at him, but momentarily seems to change his mind, finds a new course of action. He reaches out and takes John into his arms, holding him close. His grip isn’t comforting or friendly or sensual, though; his arms are stiff, awkward, as if he has been instructed to embrace a stranger. He puts his lips against John’s temple, just next to John’s ear, and mutters darkly, at the back of his throat.

“Take the bags to Metro. And soon.”

John puts his hands against Sherlock’s chest and firmly pushes him away so that he can look straight into the ice-blue eyes. “But what’s the point?” John asks. His voice is so cold he feels dismay, but it is true for him, somehow, or it would never have been said in the first place. “Why do you even need DNA? You know who did this to you.” John grimaces again. “They know.”

“Do they know?” Sherlock replies, his voice mild. He has seen and accepted John’s judgment, and won’t fight it. John wishes he would; prays somewhere inside himself, _Fight me, Sherlock. Fight to reassure me. Please. Please care as much as I wish I didn’t._ “Well. If nothing else, it’s another charge to add to the pile. Lots of counts.”

Someone else knocks on the front door of the flat. John grabs Sherlock’s Belstaff coat out of the closet, from which Sherlock had gotten the white sheet, and tosses it at his naked flatmate. Only then does he answer the door. Rather than Mrs. Hudson returning, Molly Hooper’s too-hopeful face shines in the faint light of the hallway. “Is he all right?” she whispers.

“Oh, fuck, that’s all we need,” Sherlock says. “Let her in, John.”

John never had any intention of not letting her in, and Sherlock’s casual ordering him about is an additional irritant. “You’ve no idea how close I am to giving you a thumping,” John says over his shoulder, widening the door and admitting the coroner. Molly is dressed in a threadbare orange sweatshirt and worn jeans flecked with paint, but otherwise immaculately laundered; she is dressed for a long, messy job of caretaking, and John could kiss her with gratitude.

Sherlock sprawls on the couch, heedless of his nudity underneath the coat, giving the room an impeded view of his entire genital area, scratching one of the bigger scrapes on his belly and yawning. Molly blinks at him for a moment, bemused. “Oh, I’d love to see you try,” Sherlock drawls. “Give me a thumping. I have trained at boxing for decades; I’d see a swing coming a mile off—”

Molly’s moment of surprise melts into a wry smile as she goes to Sherlock’s side, reaches out a hand to touch his shoulder, and instead palms a syringe from one of her baggy sleeves and slips the needle into Sherlock’s arm in the same swift, easy movement. Sherlock only has a moment to gape at her and murmur, “Oh, well done,” before his head lolls onto the other shoulder and he’s out cold.

“Blimey,” says John.

“It’ll be a lot easier,” she replies, “if he’s not talking.”

“What will?” John asks. He goes to put the kettle on.

“Treating him,” she says. Her smile thins, warping into a grimace of trying-not-to-cry. John fights off the urge to give her a hug, take her hand, something to make her feel better; it’s not his place, and he has no genuine idea what she’s feeling right now, anyway. If it’s anything like how he feels, she’d be hard-pressed to name a single, clear emotion besides anger. Every other feeling is qualified by all the others. Only anger stands alone, clean, and direct. And John knows too well the feeling of being so angry, yet helpless, that tears are inevitable. He knows this because of Harry. 

“Drying someone out once they’ve poisoned themselves. I’ve been through this before,” Molly explains. “In school my housemate had a serious problem with MDMA and heroin. In combination. Now—” She swiftly, thoroughly takes Sherlock’s pulse and checks his temperature with a tympanic thermometer she nudges into his left ear. “Can we get him into bed? If not, right here’s fine.”

“I can carry him,” John says.

Molly looks at him incredibly peculiarly for a moment, her cheeks slowly turning scarlet. John feels momentary bafflement—he hadn’t said anything that rude, or odd, or sexy, had he?—but as he bends and picks up Sherlock in his coat, and Sherlock’s limbs limply splay everywhere, and when John gets a closer grip on him, the coat slips and Sherlock’s bare bum is suddenly on perfect display, and the coat flares out under him like the skirt of a dress, and John walks through the threshold into—yes, he gets it, finally—Sherlock’s bedroom.

By the time he settles Sherlock’s awkward body on the bed (too light, Sherlock’s lost a shocking amount of weight) John’s grateful for the distraction of intimations of fairytale romance; Sherlock’s unconscious, but John clearly feels how rapid and thready his heartbeat is, how he’s starting to tremble. Molly is right behind him, hoisting a cheap girl’s backpack onto the bedside table, unzipping the bag to reveal a blood-pressure cuff, a wireless heartbeat monitor and finger clip, at least two bags of fluids, and a new box of black plastic bin bags. She really does know her stuff. “Have you, er, dealt with many overdoses?” John asks.

“More than I’d like,” Molly replies.

“...Yeah,” John agrees, remembering. “But—I’ve not had to since I’ve been back. I’ve never tried to do it outside a clinical setting, even under battlefield conditions.”

She glances at John, eyes wide and lips pressed tight together. “These are battlefield conditions,” she points out, turning back to her charge. She’s very calm and in the zone now; the pale body on the bed with tachycardia is no longer Sherlock, the ineffable, the unicorn, the most fanciable bloke in the history of ever. John knows that he can’t make that division himself. He can be a doctor who accompanies Sherlock, but he’d be a rubbish actual doctor for the man. Truly and genuinely, Sherlock requires a whole team, perhaps a whole specialization devoted to him. “So do you know what he’s taken? It’ll take too long to screen for it,” Molly asks.

John retrieves the blanket from the bed from where it had been kicked to the floor the night before Sherlock left again, and covers the side of Sherlock’s body that Molly is not currently working on. “I don’t know. Ah, just guessing from affect, I would say definitely cocaine both snorted and injected, possibly smoked; alcohol, nicotine, ah...” John shrugs. “I’m only guessing.”

“It’s something.” Molly holds Sherlock’s lips open, far more gently than Sherlock had ever handled any corpses under her care, and sniffs at his mouth. “I’d also add an amphetamine.” She shakes her head. “Ehh, it’s ecstasy again. Isn’t that a little, I dunno, fourth-form bank holiday for you?” She’s talking to Sherlock now, gently tucking his overgrown hair behind his ears. She winces sees the bruising on his neck. “God, what’d he do to you?”

Feeling more than a touch awkward, John takes the whistle of the kettle as his signal to give her time alone with him (her patient; with her patient). “Cup of tea?” he calls out from the kitchen; Molly replies “Yes, please, thanks, and a pitcher of the boiled water for me, too, please.” John’s got bags in cups when the front door is tapped, sheepishly, again. He goes to the door and lets in Mrs. Hudson.

It looks like she’s has a wee cry; she’s wearing a bit more makeup now, and her eyes have the shiny, determined hardness that comes from having been washed in tears. But she looks resolute as hell. “Molly’s here, that’ll do him good, won’t it, John? Oh, I wouldn’t mind a cuppa, if the kettle’s just boiled.” She shakes her head and looks towards the bedroom warily. “The state of ‘im. That poor child. He’d just had an awful time just a few days ago! You oughtn’t to have left him alone, John, what were you thinking?”

John hands her a cup and pastes an over-bright grin on his face. The gun is heavy in his pocket, and it’s awful that he’s losing his temper with a gun on him and automatically envisioning shooting every person that irritates him. It’s time to put the gun away. And yet— “I was thinking that Moriarty is a threat,” he says, not explaining by way of explanation. “To us all.” And now he has absolutely no intentions of putting the gun away. It will stay at his side until he knows the monster is dead. “And I was doing what I could to eliminate that threat, so, Mrs. Hudson, we’ll be fine here. You can.” He even waves his hand a bit. “Go, if you’d like. I think we’ve got things under control for right now. You—you don’t even have to come back unless you... you know...” John squirms. “Want to.”

The landlady stands up quite straight and fixes her eye on him, and he squirms a bit more, feeling like he’s being dressed down by a disapproving aunt. “Of course I’ll want to,” Mrs. Hudson grouches. She looks towards the bedroom again, and takes a deep breath. “In a bit,” she amends. “You know.”

“Promise I’ll have clothes on him next time,” John says.

Mrs. Hudson stares at him again, eyebrows raised. “Oh,” she says. “Yes, do that.” After another quizzical glance, she takes her tea and leaves.

In the bedroom, Sherlock has regained consciousness, holding out one straw-thin arm as Molly rips velcro to remove the blood-pressure cuff from him. “I’m fine, Molly,” he protests, and catches sight of his roommate standing in the doorway. “John, please tell her I’m fine, I’m in no danger of sudden death, and I’m not in overdose.”

“Were you?” Molly asks tonelessly, taking the pitcher of hot water from John and setting it on the floor at her side. She rips open an alcohol swap in a packet and begins to scrub at the needle marks on Sherlock’s arm.

Sherlock hisses in pain, but holds steady and lets her work. “I may have felt subjectively overwhelmed at times, but I did not at any time overdose. If you’d give me something to write with, I can write you a list. Some compounds were unknown to me. John. Please take the kit to Metro. I beg you. Please.”

“I was told not to leave you alone,” John replies.

“You were told not to leave me unattended. She’s here. And I think she’d strangle me with her sphygmomanometer before she’d let me out of her sight.”

“I’m right here, Sherlock,” Molly says through gritted teeth.

Ever himself, Sherlock ignores her completely. “Actionable intelligence,” Sherlock says to John, his eyes burning with zeal even as they’re glassy with the effects of whatever Molly hit him with, not to mention whatever else is still in his bloodstream. He speaks in an urgent, strained whisper. “It’s working, John. He’s opening up. He’s telling me things. I think—I think he’s lonely.”

Molly snorts theatrically, and it’s possibly only that which keeps John from punching Sherlock in the face. “Oh, really now, that’s terrible,” John snarks, and rips the scab off a healing cigarette burn on Sherlock’s belly.

Rather than inhibiting Sherlock, it invigorates him. He grabs John’s hand, holding far too tight, and stares into John’s eyes with the fervor of a prophet. Or a madman, or possibly just a tweaker. “John, listen to me. I can break him,” he insists. 

“He’s breaking you,” John points out.

Sherlock rolls his eyes under his eyelids and shoves out his lower jaw, distorting his face as hard as he can to signal how aggravated he’s become. “Please, good Lord, that’s such a gigantic cliché. Please tell me you’re better than that. John! Please.”

“He’s pissing blood,” Molly points out quietly. “Extensive bruising over the kidneys. Looks like... he’s been kicked? Repeatedly. Quite... expertly, it seems.”

John snatches the blankets back to expose Sherlock, briskly grabs Sherlock’s penis and stares at it; indeed, there are traces of dried blood on the slit. John’s mind flashes to how he had sucked on it, how instinct tells him to suck on it now, and the thought obliterates itself with disgust. Instead, he unwraps a band-aid plaster and slaps over the tip of Sherlock’s penis. “Sorted,” he says. 

“I’ll give I.V. fluids, monitor for signs of AKI,” Molly reports. She would make a great triage nurse. Maybe she already has done; John realizes he doesn’t know much about where she’d come from, what she’d done before. Who she was, other than That Poor Girl At Bart’s In Love With Sherlock. There is steel in her spine, clearly, or the Being in Love part would have driven her mad long before now. “Would you hold up the bag for me, John?”

John helps. 

“He can mark me all he likes,” Sherlock insists, fighting hard against the sedative. “Only you have my love, John. Only you have the right to claim me as yours.” Molly frowns grimly, but preps a vein in Sherlock’s hand for the intravenous tap. Again, Sherlock doesn’t flinch at his flesh being perforated, his veins being penetrated. It’s unnatural. The look on his face, desperate, feverish, the colours all wrong, is unnatural. Why couldn’t Sherlock be sober and saying these things? He shudders beautifully as saline flows into his bloodstream, undoubtedly chilly and violating, and John wishes that he were shuddering for other reasons. That they were alone and in Sherlock’s bedroom for other reasons. “Only you. But—he wants me.” He laughs bleakly. “He will stop at nothing to sway me. He thinks this is a seduction. And he thinks he’s winning. He thinks I’m starting to... fall for him. I am his Achilles’ heel.”

“FUCK!” Molly yells abruptly, tossing a bloody alcohol pad at Sherlock’s face. John and Sherlock both blink at her in surprise. “Enough! You’re full of shit! And you know how I know you’re full of shit? Because this place is bugged. Up the bloody buggery, it’s bugged. We know this already. And yet you go on and on like a twat as if you’ve got it all figured out. All your fucking sentiment. All your cleverness. I’m done. I’m fucking done with you lot.” Her face crumples, and she rushes from the room.

After a moment, in which he cannot bring himself even to look at Sherlock, John follows her. She stands in the kitchen, pouring a cup of tea down the sink, stone-faced, angry tears streaking her cheeks. She looks ferocious, and John chastises himself for feeling another sudden sharp stab of attraction for her. He shrugs it off as stress. “I’m sorry,” John says quietly. _Sorry for all of it._

She shakes her head, not looking at him. “You—go. I need three buckets,” she says. “Three-gallon bins should do. And some vancomycin solution; I’m thinking nil by mouth is the right course at the moment. Narcan and anti-emetics. Fetch them from Barts pharmacy. I’ll text over the authorization in a moment, and here it is on paper. And—also please bring me a bottle of Hendricks’ gin, some ice, two limes, and a cucumber. Like I said, I’ve done this before.” Her mouth twists in a grim half-smile. “Go on, now. We can’t leave him alone, so off you pop.” She lifts a cup of tea and sips from it, and heads back to the bedroom.

So she’d poured out his tea. 

It makes John smile. He desperately needs it. The change in his face sends tiny waves of relaxation throughout his body—not enough to, you know, properly relax, but enough so that he no longer feels that the veins in his forehead might literally explode.

John loads his bag with the swabs and the sheet, pockets the scrip from Molly, and heads to an outside world that has never felt more welcome, or less safe. At any moment he wouldn’t be surprised to take a head shot from one of Moriarty’s snipers.

But it never comes. 

He takes a taxi to the police headquarters, and quietly passes the evidence bags to Lestrade, who looks to be several strong coffees into the morning already at nine o’clock, and who reacts to the news that Sherlock has been returned, mostly intact, with exactly the kind of glazed fear as John himself had felt. “I think it’s best if things are kept quiet,” John advises him. “Molly’s with him now, and I’m keeping an eye out—“

“But I won’t call back the team patrolling Baker Street.”

John nods. “Maybe replace them,” he says. “One of Mycroft’s cars managed to get right past them. Besides, if Moriarty was going to move on the flat, he’d have done it by now. I think we’re playing a different game now. Anyway. Sherlock will be all right in a few days. See what you can get from the swabs. Or...” John shrugs, feeling bitter. “Just toss the rape kit on the stack and forget about it.”

“That’s not fair, John,” Greg Lestrade replies evenly.

“I know, I know. It’s contagious, this... shittiness that Sherlock seems to have picked up.”

Greg tilts his head and grins a bit. “Ah, no,” he says, “Sherlock’s always had the shittiness. It’s a chronic condition, if I get my medical terminology right.”

John smiles again. If people keep this up, he might start feeling all right. Mustn’t let that happen. He returns to his errands, resisting the urge to text Molly for an update. If something goes pear-shaped, she will let him know, and in the meantime, he’s grateful he’s not in her shoes. A day of looking after a sick Sherlock had been plenty, and now he’s had a wild weekend at Ibiza’s-worth of additional substances poured into him. Fetching small plastic bins and a black bottle of gin is more like a holiday in comparison.

Nonetheless, he has to return, and he does not rush, even if he’d like to. It’s noon now, sunny and bright, another lovely summer day. In 221 Baker Street it’s dim, a bit dusty, and silent but for his footfalls on the stairs. He lets himself in quietly, and heads straight back to Sherlock’s room, promising himself he’ll drop the bags of shopping fast enough to draw his pistol if he has to.

Molly’s sitting on the side of the bed, in much the same position as John had left her, but her posture is much less tense. Sherlock lies still, asleep, with the IV line feeding saline into one of his delicate hands, the fingernails rimed with black dirt and the knuckles shaggy and swollen. At least it looks as if Sherlock gave as good as he got. “Oh, thank God,” Molly says, seeing John, “I’m dying for a pee.”

“Sorry,” John reflexively calls after her as she hurries from the room. John would have liked to ask her details about Sherlock’s condition, but he can see for himself that Sherlock is sleeping peacefully, possibly sedated again, the largest of his skin injuries bandaged but most of them left open to the air to dry. He doesn’t stink, which is a blessing; no infections, no incontinence as of yet, no bleeding. In fact Sherlock doesn’t look too bad at all. “You bastard,” John murmurs to him, smiling, stroking the curls rising from Sherlock’s forehead. He wants to kiss him, as well, but... something holds him back. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel... allowed.

 _Only you have my heart,_ he’d said, though.

John grimaces. No wonder Molly had asked for the gin.

She’s back from the toilet, her expression downcast but determined. “I’ve got this, John,” she says. “You should go to work.”

“I should stay, though,” John protests. “What if you need help?”

“I won’t,” she insists, smiling at him, eyes shining. Brave. Not enjoying this, but perhaps enjoying this, just a tiny bit. “I can always call for Mrs. Hudson, who I can tell really wants to help pitch in. And if you want to help me right now, I’d love a cuppa.” She pulls over the chair set against the wall, and settles it at Sherlock’s side, eye level right where the IV bag of saline has been affixed to the wall with blue painter’s tape. “Trust me. He’s all right in my care. Anything happens? I call you immediately. Okay?”

“All right,” John agrees, frowning. “I don’t like it.”

Molly wrinkles her nose at him. “Don’t care what you like.”

Of course John can’t go to work. He’s far too distracted. Instead he goes back to Metro, only to find that Lestrade is out, and Sally Donovan is on duty, and she has clearly not been briefed on any specific rape kits that have been delivered that day. It’s aggravating, but it’s for the best; John retreats, leaving her to her despised paperwork, and goes for a walk instead. He had hoped that exercise would stimulate his mind to find a solution, even a direction that he could take, but he cannot think of anything but worry for Sherlock, for Mrs. Hudson, for anyone connected to Sherlock in any way. 

_I’ll burn you. I will burn. The **heart** out of you._

John walks and wanders until, gradually, a pleasant fatigue wears down the terror that painfully tightens his chest. He takes no cabs and avoids the Underground, and any well-populated, crowded areas, just in case he’s a target. He doesn’t notice anything unusual in the slightest; it’s just a pleasant summer day, and the city seems nearly peaceful. The phone does not ring.

When he returns to the flat in early evening, Molly is sitting on the settee in the front room, drinking from a tall glass stuffed with bits of lime and cucumber. “He’s asleep,” she reports, her low voice exhausted. John grimaces in sympathy, imagining what kinds of horrible things a Sherlock jonesing for cocaine might have said to her. She seems, however, undamaged. “Do us a favor and take out the buckets,” she says, standing up. “Two for the toilet and one for the bins. He’s allergic to the anti-emetic, so that didn’t get used. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he’d sicked up his own stomach lining. I gave him an additional dose of sedative that ought to keep him asleep till morning, but, with his metabolism and ... all that, he might wake up before then. Anyway, I’m off home.” She yawns. “He’ll need you tonight. You’ll want to stay close.”

“I will.” John can only smile back. “Thank you. Really.”

“Yeah,” she says with a sigh, draining her glass. “Bath, sleep... work tomorrow. Back to normality.” John can’t tell if she’s looking forward to it or not. Without another word, she goes.

As much as he’d love to have dinner first, he steels himself for unpleasantness and sets to dumping the buckets, which honestly do not reward closer examination. Once that’s sorted, he finds that Mrs. Hudson has laid out some sandwiches for him in the kitchen, and Molly was nice enough to leave the majority of the bottle of gin behind. John takes a bite of sandwich and then drinks a healthy shot of gin straight down, justifying that he just needs the one to deal with the night to come.

He brings the rest of the sandwiches to Sherlock’s room, sits in the chair, checks the bandage on Sherlock’s hand where the IV had been, and resumes his watch. Sherlock lies quiet and still, breathing easily.

It’s around eleven o’clock, and John feeling drowsy enough to consider making tea, when Sherlock stirs, and opens his eyes. Almost immediately, his face twists in pain. “Oh, God,” Sherlock rasps, “the bucket.”

John holds out a clean one, still damp from being rinsed in boiling water, and Sherlock quietly tips his head into it, shoulders jerking. Nothing comes up, but even the act of retching looks painful. When the wave of sickness passes, Sherlock lies back again, shuddering so violently his teeth chatter. “All right, then, all right,” John says, climbing onto the bed next to him, wrapping his arms around Sherlock’s xylophone ribs, holding him until the shaking ends. “Are you cold?”

“Not really... Honestly, it’s just a slight hangover. I’ll be back to normal by morning. Now, I need water.” 

Still some in the pitcher that John had brought in, in the morning, cooled to room temperature now. Sherlock drinks, slowly and carefully, from the side of the pitcher, and settles back to the bed with a heavy sigh. “I want a cigarette,” he muses, and chuckles. 

“As your doctor,” John replies, “no.” 

Sherlock almost laughs. So miraculous to see that smile again, that beautiful, grotesque smile on that beautiful, grotesque face, rainbowed with bruises, the curved lips cracked and misshapen, still healing from having been split and bloodied a week ago. John’s heart aches as if it is being pulled out of his chest, and he strokes Sherlock’s hair, firmly, possessive and gentle. Sherlock arches towards the touch, growling softly in his throat, as if attempting to purr. 

John pulls the blanket over them both. They lie alongside each other, and the world is quiet. The eye of the hurricane.

“You said... you said, I have your love,” John says. “Are you going to delete that?”

“I... hope I never have to,” Sherlock whispers. 

All right, fine. Pragmatic, always, but hope? A rare, precious flash of sentiment. “I’d kiss you,” says John, “but your breath smells like the Thames.”

Sherlock grins at that. “Like this, then,” he says, turning onto his side, away from John, but pulling him in close, demanding to be spooned. John sits up and takes off his jacket, carefully removing the gun from his pocket, and setting it, in plain view, on the bedside table. Sherlock glances at it, and away again, grabbing John, holding him tight against his bandaged back. One garment by one, the rest of John’s clothing comes off, and ends up on the floor in a heap, and John falls asleep, curled around the already-sleeping-again Sherlock.

He wakes in the dawn light. The gun is still there, where he’d left it. Sherlock is awake, showered, half-dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed in just his trousers, breathing carefully, as if he needed a rest before braving the remainder of his clothes. “I’d like to have a full English,” he says to John, without looking at him. “Hotel Belgravia does a nice one starting at seven o’clock. Join me?”

John gets in a quick wash and puts on fresh clothes. Sherlock dons a dark-brown shirt, the better to shade his injuries, and the trousers’ matching jacket. Besides the riot of watercolor shades on his mouth and jaw, he looks quite as usual. John retrieves his jacket from Sherlock’s floor, replaces the gun in his pocket, and together the men leave the flat.

They walk a few blocks before either speaks. 

“At times I do wish I could be honest with her, John,” Sherlock admits. 

It takes a moment before John figures out that it’s Molly Sherlock’s referring to. “I think you already were a bit honest,” John replies. “I mean, if you could, for just a moment, consider her feelings. Sometimes feelings do affect facts.”

Sherlock sneers a bit and shakes his head at that, but does not attempt to deny it. “I know that it’s too much to ask for a logical response. Nonetheless I am grateful that she provided treatment. I would have been fine without it, but I appreciated the lorazepam shots and the sleep they provided. Also—fundamentally, she was right.” Sherlock pauses for John to blink at him in disbelief. “I don’t have it all sorted out. The apartment is bugged; I was putting on a performance for the benefit of the throngs listening in on 221B Baker Street. And yet.” Sherlock glances up at a street lamp, and its obvious CCTV camera, currently pointed away from them. It’s as if Sherlock led them there, specifically, to speak in its presence. “I know that at least some of the listening, and probably surveillance devices installed by the ‘British government’ remain in the flat, and active, no matter what Mycroft claims. He always holds a hidden card; that’s how it’s done. There is more than one enemy at hand, John. Remember. Always.” 

He frowns at the camera. “For all his bombast, Moriarty is only a dabbler, an idea man, compared to the staggering criminality of my brother... crimes so esoteric, so numerous, so flagrant that they cease to be crime and become policy. It was no mere figure of speech when I told you he’s dangerous. It is him. This is all on him. Who has benefitted the most from overhearing our conversations, John? Who has the most to gain by holding that information? They are together. Whether or not they even realize it. For how long, I don’t know, but I suspect at least fifteen years. They are working together.”

John takes all this in. “You can’t mean.”

“The last piece of the puzzle of how. And of why. I cannot mean anything but this has all been a way to make us dance. Both of us. Me, because I won’t play along, and him, because he will.” Sherlock smiles grimly. “Oh, what you found in Cambridge is bigger than anything I’ve investigated thus far. It could change the world.”

“He’s your brother,” John says, fighting the sinking feeling in his chest. “I don’t want to think of him as… as this Emperor Palpatine figure, pulling the strings from the shadows—

“Emperor who?”

John waves his hand. “Never mind. It’s a… Star Wars thing. Fiction. Fantasy! You can’t mean to go after Mycroft. You can’t mean to—expose a connection—accuse him of—”

“He wouldn’t hesitate, were the shoe on the other foot. Indeed he hasn’t.” Sherlock tuns to stare at the horizon. “All these years. To string me up rather than admit his own weakness. To use my own weaknesses against me to conceal his own, graver misdeeds. I shall endeavor to do the same to him. Oh, I have no hesitation at all. We are Holmes; ice water flows through our veins.”

“You could get a transfusion,” John mumbles.

Sherlock smiles and turns his attention to John, gazing at him. His eyes are clear, sharp, sober, utterly committed. He watches and waits until the CCTV camera points towards them again, and then he ducks his head to kiss John on the lips. John is startled and a bit annoyed and taken aback. “Sherlock,” he admonishes. 

“You are my treasure,” Sherlock says. “John Watson. My own dear John. Please. Trust me? If you love me, if so-called love has any meaning at all, trust me in a way Mycroft never could. You are not a Holmes.” Sherlock’s smile bares all his teeth like a wolf. “Use it. Use that against him.” He breaks away, shaking his head, the troubled look coming back to his face. 

“Or we are all the walking dead.”

++++++++

When they return to Baker Street, some hours later, stuffed with sausages, tomatoes, beans, toast, and quince jam, John’s phone shudders, signaling an incoming text. John lets Sherlock go ahead of him into the flat, and regards the message on his phone.

**This is all so very sweet my teeth are rotting. Time for US to trip, shorty. I can’t wait to show you the blue sky. N 51.330799 N 51 19 50.9 E 0.032500 E 0 1 57**

A shock, like being doused with ice water. A proper shock this time.

“Ah, Sherlock,” John calls into the apartment, standing just on the threshold, seventeen steps set between him and the street, where he means to call an end to this. To all of this. A man has limits, and John Watson has reached his. “I’m going to run up to the Boots to get something. You’ll be all right for fifteen minutes?”

“Of course,” Sherlock scoffs. “I have days of newspapers to catch up on.”

“If I come back, and you’ve left, I’m going to kill you.”

“Oh, we’ve escalated from the ‘thumping,’ I see. Fifteen minutes. Starting now.”

John rubs his nose, grimacing. More lies. Lies upon lies. Is this what they’ve become? Has Moriarty already won? There could not be a more obvious trap, and John is running into it with bells on.

But he squares his shoulders and raises his chin. Won or lost, Moriarty will not survive the day. This is endgame. The only way out of this is to put two in his chest, and as many shots into his head as John’s got bullets. Already he is praying for close range, so he can see the expression on Moriarty’s twisted fucking face when he knows it’s thick little John who emcompasses his doom. What he’s going to do with Mycroft… well… he’ll sort that out later. If he has to, the inner pocket of his jacket has a fresh clip, and really, better to be sent up on a double murder charge than to let this mass-murdering insanity continue.

_This, Sherlock, is what I will do for you, if I must. If this is what I was made for, I am ready, willing, and able to do what needs doing._

Outside, the bright sun beats down on John’s head and shoulders. He might as well be back in Afghanistan. He hasn’t left war behind at all.

 

TO BE CONTINUED ...in The Experiment part 5: “To and From the Heart of London”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sincere shame for taking to long to complete this. Life, uh, gets in the way.
> 
> Title from Radiohead's new song, "Burn the Witch". This is, indeed, a low-flying panic attack.
> 
> AKI = acute kidney injury/renal failure
> 
> Moriarty’s text contains coordinates to here: http://www.bigginhillairport.com/
> 
> The Belgravia Hotel is a real place, no idea if they serve a full English breakfast.
> 
> Thanks for reading - your comments and kudos give me life!


End file.
